Protest arrests and TANF/SNAP

There are a lot of people coming down to support Occupy ICE right now, both here in Portland and elsewhere around the US. One of the things that needs to be addressed is what happens if you get detained and you are on TANF or SNAP (food stamps). Now, IANAL so this is the information I could gather via online resources and talking to legal counsel. I will update this as I get more information. See the posts about HUD here and SSI/SSDI here. 

TANF: 
These benefits will continue until a conviction and possibly longer depending on the length of the sentence. If the sentence is longer than 30 days benefits will likely be suspended. That being said, the child's caretaker while you are in custody may need to apply for the benefits while you are detained so that the benefits will continue for the child. You can reapply after release and they should be reinstated provided you still qualify.  

SNAP (food stamps):
All SNAP benefits are suspended while you are detained, you are able to reapply after release. You can reapply while still in detention, but the benefits do not start until after you are released. 

Protest arrests and SSI/SSDI

There are a lot of people coming down to support Occupy ICE right now, both here in Portland and elsewhere around the US. One of the things that needs to be addressed is what happens if you get detained and you are on SSI and SSDI. I'll also address medicare and medicaid here. See this post if you are on HUD, and see this post if you are on TANF or SNAP. Now, IANAL so this is the information I could gather via online resources and talking to legal counsel. I will update this as I get more information.

SSI:
If you are detained and on SSI you will lose benefits after a full calendar month of detention. This starts upon arrest, but only if you're held in a facility during that time. You can get them reinstated after your release provided you still qualify.

SSDI:
SSDI benefits stop the 31st day you are detained after a conviction, regardless of when you were arrested. You can get them reinstated after your release provided you still qualify.

Medical benefits:
All medicare and medicaid are suspended while you are in detention, Medicare may require you to reapply after your release.

Protest arrests and HUD

There are a lot of people right now coming down to support Occupy ICE movements, here in Portland and elsewhere in the US and one of the things that needs to be addressed is if you are detained what happens to your HUD benefits. Now, IANAL but myself and others have been talking to legal counsel, Home Forward (the housing authority in Portland), and doing a lot of digging through the relevant legal frameworks over the last few days to get as accurate of information as we can. This will be updated as we get more information, and look for a future post for information around SSDI, SSI, TANF, and SNAP as well. (SSI/SSDI info here) (TANF/SNAP info here)

If you are detained for 28 days or more (Home forward's number was 30 days) you WILL lose your HUD benefits, if you (or your family) fails to tell the housing authority that you are/will be out of the unit for that long the entire family may also lose their benefits. After this, the reports vary with some saying that you will lose your benefits permanently and others saying that you are free to reapply when the wait list opens again (in the case of Home Forward, this is anticipated at being 4+ years). That being said, even if you can reapply you may no longer qualify because depending on the type of crime it may exclude you from benefits for a period of time. According to the home forward criteria for residency: "A felony involving serious injury, kidnapping, death, arson, rape, sex crimes and/or child sex crimes, extensive property damage, drug-related offenses, class A/felony burglary or class A/felony robbery" all correspond to a denial regardless of when the activity occurred. For most protests these are less likely to come up, but in the case of occupy ICE we are dealing with potential federal offenses and if they decide that there is extensive property damage, serious injury, death, etc. than you do risk falling into this category.

Denial for 7 years happens for "any felony, misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor involving assault, intimidation, sex, drugs, property damage, or weapons violations." This is the area that is most likely to happen as assault and property damage are common charges for protests of this nature. It is also worth noting here that these crimes do  not require a conviction. Per again Home Forward: "we may deny an application if there is credible information about criminal behavior, even if there has not been a conviction for such behavior." Legally, they have the ability to use a "preponderance of evidence" and do not require there to be an actual conviction for crimes to lead to a denial. In many cases you can use a professional reference letter to help your case with regards to past criminal history, but that does not help if you are a current HUD recipient. Finally, if you are not the person with HUD but a family member that you live with is the person with benefits your activities can impact their HUD; it is not an automatic loss of benefits but there is language in the Home Forward statement of family obligations that includes family members not committing crimes so the potential is there.

If you are not detained for 28 days or more many of these cautions still apply, depending on the severity of the crime, the specifics of what occurred, and how long you are detained for you may still lose your HUD benefits. It is down to the individual housing authority on if that occurs, and potentially even the individual assessing the case. As usual, you have the right to appeal, but it is not guaranteed. The person I spoke with at Home Forward said that apart from felonies and violent crimes you are not as likely to lose your benefits with a detention of less than 30 days, it is however, NOT a surety and any criminal activity could be used to revoke your HUD.

We need to have a hard look at gun laws in the US

I don't care about changing the nature of warfare. 

I don't care about making war more humanitarian. 

Why? Because that would be a fundamentally futile effort. War by its very nature is not humanitarian. It is violent, painful, and destructive. Why would I want to change it? I want to obliterate it. I want my step-kids, my nieces, and my nephew to grow up and some day have a world where they don't have to hear about roadside bombs killing people, where 42 people aren't dead from suicide bombers at an airport, where queer people of color aren't terrified after a shooter gunned them down in a nightclub. 

Yes, I link that last one to war as well. 

It's a crime committed using a weapon purely designed for war. No one can honestly claim the AR-15 is a hunting weapon. No one can honestly claim it's for target practice. No, assault rifles of that nature are made for, and good at, one thing: killing people. In mass. These weapons kill humans quickly, efficiently, and easily. That gun doesn't jam easily, it doesn't fall apart easily, it doesn't take much in the way of instruction, it's easy to be accurate with little instruction. I know, I've shot one. I started talking about war, but the first issue to address to have that dream of no more warfare is to address the issue of gun violence. Violence only begets more violence.

We can start this process by looking at guns themselves. I'm not against all guns, I'm perfectly fine with hunting rifles, and even think that hunting for food is a valid and worthwhile skill to have. I have family members whose meat intake is largely comprised of food they've hunted, and that is just fine. I don't even really care about pistols to be honest, go ahead and have one at home “for protection” or to target shoot at the local range. Just do it as safely as you can and remember guns are like sex, you can only make it safer, not completely safe. What we need is some common sense gun control. Fully automatics, easily modifiable semi-automatics, in general guns designed to kill a lot of people and do so quickly should not be in the hands of civilians. 

I'd go so far as to say the military doesn't really need them either but, I'd at least be happier without them in the hands of Bob Smith from Small Town, US. A civilian doesn't need something like that. We also need longer waiting periods. I should not be able to walk into the gun and knife expo and walk out with a gun. Ever. There is no need for that kind of thing. There is no need so great you should be able to have a weapon in hand in a day, even 3 days is short but at least it's enough time to do a background check potentially. Speaking of background checks; what is the point if the flags don't show up? Someone is on a terrorist watch list? We should be asking real hard why they want an AR-15. Flag for a violent crime? Again, same questions. Domestic violence? The Supreme Court just upheld the idea that domestic violence perpetrators do not have the right to bear arms, which is awesome. 

Waiting periods also have another benefit in that someone who is contemplating a violent action - be it against themselves or others. This break helps people have the critical time that can help people think through their potentially violent actions. I work in suicide prevention and this is one of the best ways to stop someone from acting out their suicide. Getting a person to stop, even for a short time, helps reduce the incidence of these deaths. The same is true of other types of violent actions.

Here in Oregon where I live, the law doesn't require guns to be stored safely, or even for people to register their guns with the state. There is no waiting period and no limit on how many guns can be purchased at one time. There is no law requiring the removal of firearms from people that are now prohibited from possessing them. While dv perpetrators are prohibited from owning guns, the state of Oregon does not require them to surrender the guns they already possessed before the incident. How is this an acceptable state of affairs? 

Oregon, like many states, needs to have better controls in place to reduce the number of gun deaths. California is often cited as a state whose gun controls are something to strive for and I agree. Waiting periods, restrictions on the number of weapons you are able to purchase at a time, licenses, prohibitions on assault weapons, 50  caliber rifles, and large capacity ammo magazines, are all just sensible. The fact is that these common sense regulations reduce gun violence, California is a perfect example of this. Study after study has shown that there is a strong correlation between stronger laws and fewer gun deaths per capita. 

Massachusetts recently also added stronger gun laws by making it so semi-automatic rifles are banned. This new law also makes duplicates or copies of a semi-automatic weapon illegal and explicitly defined this as including any weapon that has interchangeable components with a banned weapon. They also call out the ar-15 and ak-47 in the law. They have now become the first state to ban these weapons and I would not be surprised if California soon follows suit. 

It’s time that we push for stronger laws nationally, and if that is slow in coming, on a state by state basis. At the very least we should not be allowing people to possess firearms whose sole purpose is to kill other humans quickly and efficiently. There were 7 shootings involving multiple people on July 4th, 2016 alone and as a result 7 people are dead and 30 are injured. As I write this yesterday saw 3 dead and 5 injured. It goes on and on. We can reduce the number of dead and injured, we can prevent the majority of these attacks. We just need to follow the lead of the rest of the world and have stricter, sensible, gun laws. 

Edit: I added a few things and updated it to reflect the mass. Law change. 

Nightbot, gamers and gendered slurs.

Note: this has been sitting around for a while and apparently never got published >.< since It's there I might as well share it with everyone. <3

So I am a gamer and am involved in many different communities around gaming. One of these is online where we all play in the beta of an indie game (SpyParty), stream together, chat with each other and even are doing a table top RPG via stream and teamspeak. We use a service called NightBot so we can have music in our stream and also because the ability to add custom commands is funny and handy. 

For example in one of the streams I moderate if you type in "!entertained" NightBot responds with "The stream is entertained! (for the xth time)" We use it as a source for explaining games, inside jokes and general hilarity depending on the stream. We also really heavily rely on the music abilities to create interesting playlists that are viewer created. 

That being said recently we tried to create a joke command that was "... YET." Innocuous right? 

Apparently not. 

When I went to use the command this is what I got in reply from nightbot: (Buananoche is my name on twitch)

Buananoche-> Do you REALLY think I'm going to allow YOU to execute commands on MY behalf? Fuck YOU bitch!

Woah. Really NightBot? What is going on?

Because I had no idea why I got this response from my command I tweeted the guys at nightbot. Like you do.

So I asked why me using ellipses led to that response and this is what the conversation looked like:

@TheNightBot: @buananoche if a chat line starts with a period it is interpreted by the server as a chat command 

 @buananoche @theNightbot and so it calls the person a bitch? That seems extreme

@TheNightBot: @buananoche Because people normally try to do abusive things like make it change its /color or /ban folks 

 @buananoche: @theNightbot it's just rather rude and was an unwelcome surprise in my chat, I'm not a fan of being called a gendered slur. Multiple streams I mod use nightbot and it really turns all of us off of the service. Especially for me, being a female gamer I get called that a lot-It's not welcome where I mod and in our community. Do you have any reason for that response (this was 3 tweets)

Big surprise... that's where our conversation ended. My (male) buddy also tweeted them, he was less annoyed than I am. I don't exactly what he said but he did tell me their response:

"Gamers in general aren't offended by such a statement, or at least I nor friends.  The statement fits along with its timeout msgs."

 Good to know that according to the people at NightBot I am not a gamer in general. And that they think that calling a random person a bitch fits with their other messages. I've used nightbot in various capacities for quite a while now and this is the first time I have EVER seen something like this. Snark? fine. Gendered slurs? Color me surprised.

Am I surprised by TheNightBot's response? Nope. I wish I was though. This kind of thing is so common for me in gaming communities that I just can't bring myself to be surprised when it does. That's why I love the SpyParty community - when I comment about something not being okay what happens? They apologize and actually try to fix it. I have been in the SpyParty community for over a year now, over and over things that are endemic in our society, and especially in gaming society, that I don't stand for the other gamers and the developer himself have made sure to change their unacceptable behavior. Ranging from fat jokes to gendered slurs and more they have taken what I said, maybe questioned the 'why isn't it okay' type things, but they changed the behavior. Even when they admitted to not understanding why it wasn't okay.

Oh, well. Nightbot just responded to me:

Your interpretation of the response is of your own accord. The response serves to defend the bot when people try to undermine it.

Oh thanks NightBot twitter person. I really appreciate being told that

Twitter, report tweet button and trans phobia

So twitter has finally caved in and is adding a report tweet function to android and the web (why this was rolled out on iPad first I have no idea). This is in response to Caroline Criado-Perez's hoard of harasser that sparked a petition on Change.org to ask twitter to ya know... Make it so people can report rape threats like the ones Criado-Perez was getting. I am not going to hold my breath about how long it will take for this function to be implemented but at least they have said they will.

So why am I posting? Apart from going yay Caroline for successfully campaigning to keep women on the British pound Ophelia Benson's blog posts over at FtB have made me ponder another issue with this. Well, the comments on this made me think. 

Will this report button be used to promote anti-trans action? 

The first comment from jade hawk:

"I agree that twitter needs an easier way to report threats of violence, but I agree with the many trans people and women of color on twitter who have points out that an "abuse" button will be used by e.g. TERFs to kick their critics off twitter, in effect becoming more marginalizing than empowering. Many of them already get silenced by abuse of the spam reporting button. Unlike YouTube, twitter is largely real-time, so having your tweets restored after a day or two, when its disappeared from everyone's feed, protects the abusers of the reporting system... And this... Is why the community of minority women on twitter has been reacting very negatively to many of the suggestions made by white cis feminists on how to make twitter safer: because they experience many of these actions as being thrown under the bus, since they're expressed in these wide-sweeping terms."

Natasha:

"Thank you jade hawk, those are my concerns too, I know a number of trans women whose accounts would have been deleted for abuse because they stood up to trans-misogynists online.
Too often the cure for abuse just makes it worse."

Ophelia responded:

"Why are those concerns more important than the concerns of women who do want a way to report abuse?" 

Erinnikla:

"Who said they are more important?
The point is that they should not be less important"

I can't help but think that the concerns voiced are valid. Silencing via false reports of abuse is a common tactic against trans people and WoC. It's an issue that I've found is rarely discussed outside of these two groups and something that cis and white people don't recognize far too often. Abuse reporting mechanisms are often used to silence - especially when I report of abuse ends up with the post or comment being removed immediately until the reported abuse can be confirmed. This, as jade hawk says, is a way to remove that person from the conversation in a complete and immediate manner. It's a concern that needs to be addressed that I don't have a good answer to.

However, not implementing an abuse reporting system isn't the way to fix the problem. I signed the petition to ask twitter to put the button on the web and android platforms because I think that we also Ned a way to report people that are abusing others on twitter. I've gotten my fair share of harassment on the site and I know others have had it worse than I. Look at Criado-Perez's situation - receiving 50+ rape threats per day with no on site recourse. Look at the situation that happened with mabus, death threats and harassment over years. Both of these situations ended up with police involvement. We can see there is a real problem here. 

Will a report abuse button deter such voracious attackers? No. But it will help with the smaller attacks and may help with a reporting paper trail for larger cases. Someone who is abusing others via social network shouldn't be allowed to continue and blocking or spam reporting doesn't cut it. Blocking just forces the abuser to target the victims friends and colleagues or for others to retweet or post their own vitriol and so long as the person isn't saying the same thing of and over spam reporting isn't exactly effective. Beside, it isn't spam - it's harassment. 

What can we do for trans people and WoC though? A possibility that comes to mind is to have the reported tweet removed from the reporters feed but not the overall conversation, and prevent it from being retweeted until such time as the case has been reviewed. Ideally we would have a quick view system in place too - like under 24hr not days. This would make it so the person doing the reporting has some protection, the case would be reviewed and in the event of a false report to silence the conversation can still go on. Another addition might be to impose a mute on someone with multiple abuse reports, or to have a twitter restraining order in place while the report is being looked at. These still have issues but I am just brainstorming here. I wish I had better answers but abuse and harassment need to be able to be reported, it's important and trans people and WoC could also use it to report their abusers. Like any system set up on a social network though it can be abused and it's hard to have an effective, non-problematic system implemented. 

Any thoughts on a way for abuse reporting that doesn't silence people who are being falsely reported while still protecting victims of harassment and threats? 

Hiatus

As some of you know my health isn't so hot these last six months. I'm sorry for the long gaps between posts but I just don't have the spoons to keep up with my daily life let alone blogging. I will get back to it and hopefully my health will improve sooner rather than later but for now - I am going to have to continue my unplanned hiatus as yet another thing has failed on me that requires yet another specialist and even more medication.

Cheers and thanks for the patience
Lee

Update aug 26:
I've gotten a discogram and have essentially confirmed that I'll have to have a disc replacement. Well, likely at some point four of them but here in the states I can only get two at a time so I'll get two replaced then later the other two because they are all dead. I don't recommend a discogram, they suck horribly.

Update jul 30

I'm starting to feel better and while I'm far from 100% I am working regularly again and am getting out a bit. The deep depression I've been in is fading back away so I feel like I should be around again. I've been working through some posts for asexy on sex, and am working on ideas for queer transformations and a good night for science. I'll be trying to write a post during work for at least one of my blogs every day. I may resurrect on dread more to write about games. I am actually feeling excited to write for y'all so look for content soon!