@gobbiemel:matrix.org [Matrix] | Your Garden Variety Goblin | 18+ pls, here be Adult topics on occasion | Mostly reblogs, sometimes thoughts, but my brain is chowder so I keep it in the tags a lot | My posts are tagged #prrsonal | When any of you darlings reblog my art posts just know I am gently kissing your forehead and baking you a strawberry cobbler | Bigots and similar Scum get blocked without warning | If you wanna call me something, you can call me Mel | She/They flavored | 42 | Queer | Atheist with a dash of Animism | Chaotic Neutral | Lifelong Art Creacher | Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Cop | Comfortably Cringe | Clinical Heebie Jeebies and Constant Thinking Syndrome |
Death leaves Us homesick, who behind,
Except that it is gone
Are ignorant of its Concern
As if it were not born.
Through all their former Places, we
Like Individuals go
Who something lost, the seeking for
Is all that's left them, now—
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.”
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
do you think catholic priests are irresistible to vampires? virgins, covered in crucifixes (inherent allure of the forbidden,) access to their throats limited by those sexy little collars, etc.
buy What Manner of Man on Amazon or Itchio | read it for free
It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.
It has always been possible. It is still possible.