plinkodiskhorse

You may know me as Panic. This is my discourse blog. 35, white, Mvskoke native, Ashkenazi Jew, bisexual, transsexual man.

[40ouncesandamule]

How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked Me for Days Over ‘Stolen’ Plates and Sent Police After Me

A simple error got magnified by Flock's nationwide surveillance camera network and ended with four cop cars boxing me in.

Oh hey! Look! It's that thing everyone on the left said was going to happen happening!

[withbriefthanksgiving]

“The plates on this car are stolen,” Officer Ganshyn said. My face must’ve twisted in disbelief because he continued, saying they weren’t sure whether the car itself or just the plates were stolen. This made absolutely no sense. Car companies keep meticulous track of the fleets they loan out to the media. The vehicles all have special manufacturer or dealer plates that are logged every time one enters or exits. The officers eventually ran the Range Rover’s VIN, and it came back clean, but in their view, the plates were definitely stolen.

Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.

[…]

One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.

[…]

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.

Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

8 July 2026

[imawitchywitch]

Just in case!

[stoic-rose]

Here is a link to Pride Plans where you can get this stuff started.

[intheimpalawithdean]

[Image ID: A graphic with the Pride flag behind a white rectangle that has a list of things one needs if marriage equality is overturned.

Black text reads:

Legal documents same-sex couples should have in case marriage equality is overturned

Revocable Living Trust

Last Will and Testiment

Healthcare Power of Attorney

Durable Power of Attorney

Living Will

Hospital Visitation Authorization Form — one for your partner and one for your chosen family

Agent for Disposition of Remains

Pet Care Directive

Tangible Personal Property Memorandum /END ID]

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Trump's HHS abandons threat to withhold Medicare and Medicaid funding over trans care

NPR has learned that the Department of Health and Human Services will not be finalizing its most aggressive attempt to end gender-affirming

"The Trump administration is abandoning its most aggressive attempt to end gender-affirming care for youth nationally, according to an official document obtained by NPR.

The document shows that the Department of Health and Human Services will not be finalizing a proposed rule that would have blocked all Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care."

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

[sleepy-bebby]

There’s a scientific journal called “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List”.

In 2005, computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this highly profane ten-page paper as a joke, to send in replying to unwanted conference invitations. It literally just contains that seven-word phrase over and over, along with a nice flow chart and scatter-plot graph.

An Australian computer scientist named Peter Vamplew sent it to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in response to spam from the journal. Apparently, he thought the editors might simply open and read it.

Instead, they automatically accepted the paper — with an anonymous reviewer rating it as “excellent” — and requested a fee of $150. While this incident is pretty hilarious, it’s a sign of a bigger problem in science publishing. This journal is one of many online-only, for-profit operations that take advantage of inexperienced researchers under pressure to publish their work in any outlet that seems superficially legitimate.

[vanglaggle]

"why are so many leftists disabled" maybe it's because disabled people don't really care for the "kill all disabled people" parties but who can say

[ifeelsck]

My zine in the lineage of Fucking Trans Women by Mira Bellwether, about my anatomy as a trans woman who's had nullification surgery. It started as a user manual for a partner but I believe it has value beyond that.

Doll-Parts/Doll Parts.pdf at main · Crythedral/Doll-Parts

NeogenitalsEvangelion. Contribute to Crythedral/Doll-Parts development by creating an account on GitHub.

[opencommunion]

"This new mode of sex intelligibility necessitated the eradication of the ‘true hermaphrodite’—that is, a conception of the hermaphrodite as possessing ‘both’ sexes, in a manner of corporeal simultaneity. This conception of hermaphroditism is reliant on what Anne Fausto-Sterling terms, citing early modern English jurist Sir Edward Coke, the doctrine of the ‘sex which prevaileth,’ a notion which, while testifying to the legal and juridical fixity of a two-gender system, nevertheless acknowledged a certain sexed co-presence in cases concerning hermaphrodites.

It is precisely this conception of sexed co-presence which is erased with the rise of the ‘pseudo-hermaphrodite’, which relegated hermaphroditic hybridity to the realm of the chimerical, claiming that behind the apparently mixed sexual attributes of hermaphrodites lay a ‘true’ sex, rather than a ‘prevailing’ or dominant one.

What ensued was the development of a variety of methodologies and experiments which aimed to find one absolute material determinant of sex and, thus, to discredit ‘true hermaphroditism’ (that is, an absolute, irreducible entwinement of ‘male’ and ‘female’ attributes in a subject) in order to reify and further congeal dominant cultural conceptions regarding the ‘truth’ of univocal sex."

Hil Malatino, "Situating Bio-Logic, Refiguring Sex: Intersexuality and Coloniality," in Critical Intersex ed. Morgan Holmes, 2009

[opencommunion]

thinking abt this again bc I've noticed even people who are enthusiastic about the idea of intersex liberation often believe this core intersexist myth that there is an underlying 'true' M or F body that acts like a 'base' that the intersex characteristics alter (recently I even saw another intersex blogger say this!)

the reality is that the violent history of intersex medicalization is essentially a parade of failed attempts to identify that 'true' M or F body. the medical field has never been able to settle on which sexed characteristics indicate that 'true' sex -- is it hormones, genital configuration, chromosomes ... ? you'll get a different answer from different 'experts.' and what happens when all those characteristics show variations (hi)? the decision of sex assignation is most obviously arbitrary and subjective for bodies like mine ('true hermaphrodites' ig), where the medical professional really can't really latch on to any part of my physiology as a conclusive binary sex indicator. but I want to stress that sex assignation is always arbitrary and subjective, at bottom -- even if someone's chromosomes, genital configuration, internal reproductive organs, or hormone profile matches the binary M or F box, the full patchwork of 'sex' is a combination of these characteristics and others (muscle mass and fat distribution! facial structure! all manner of baseless phrenological bs!) and the assignation of sex (at birth and later) is always a matter of subjectively prioritizing certain features over others

when an infant presents genital variations, the decision of whether to operate and which binary sex to surgically mimic is largely left to the discretion of the doctor. any given genitally ambiguous baby might end up with one or the other sex, based primarily on what doctor's hands they happen to fall into (and sometimes secondarily on parental preference). when a pubescent kid shows up with an unexpected ('imbalanced') sex hormone profile, whether the doctor recommends 'correcting' their body towards testosterone dominance or estrogen dominance will depend on social factors and the doctor's pre-established views of sex, as much as (if not more than) the other features of the child's body

any effort to find an intersex person's true fundamental sex is futile because there's no such thing. if you understand in theory that sex is constructed, it's important to fully shift your worldview and actually dismantle the influence of the colonial modern gender system on your mindset

[animentality]

[plinkodiskhorse]

For me, the most notable difference between undergrad and grad school was my ability to write a good essay of double digit page length. In undergrad, that was a challenge. By the time I was in grad school, I could bang out a 10 page paper over the weekend, if needed.

[hellallamerican]

i need everyone to get into college football right now i am dying to talk about the texas tech situation. this is the kind of thing that will be referenced for the next 100 years. there will be documentaries and biopics about this.

[hellallamerican]

no one asked but here

texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.

the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.

the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).

well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).

every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.

now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.

this is all just startomg but its so juicy and delicious. the NCAA is going to crumble to dust if they cannot get this injunction overturned. schools like georgia and nebraska have plenty of money so a suit isnt necessarily a concern, but this will absolutely change college football forever. i cant stop reading about it.

[hellallamerican]

update on this: texas tech is claiming that every school who has/is considering cancelling all contests is "afraid" that texas tech is better than them. what's funny about this is that sorsby's stats are average. he is not good enough for this kind of protection. many schools who have already cancelled or are considering it have much better quarterbacks than sorsby. also, texas tech's head coach had said that it's actually ok that sorsby bet against his own team because it "its not murder or assault."

[hellallamerican]

the attorney general of texas has threatened to investigate the Big 12 conference if they sanction Texas Tech

[hellallamerican]

the claim is now that texas texh university just cares so much about brendan sorsbys mental health that they have to sue everyone who calls this an integrity violation. any other school who wouldnt defend an athlete that committed this violation "doesnt care about mental health"

[robertreich]

Trump purchased tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock in UFC’s parent company while promoting the event, according to a May financial disclosure. Every president since Ronald Reagan has either put their assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees or sold off their stocks to eliminate conflicts of interest. Trump did not.

[stillnaomi]

using violence to liberate people from sweatshops, unsafe mines, and grinding poverty isn't the same as using violence to impose those things on people. the idea that violence is morally repugnant regardless of context is a belief that every oppressor throughout history would love for the oppressed to hold

[relelvance]

Does he have "nonbinary vibes" or is he just east asian

[relelvance]

[lakemojave]

Important addition

[plinkodiskhorse]

I recommend the book “Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood” by Bram Djikstra. It’s dense as FUCK but does an admirable job of pulling apart the anti-black racism, Orientalism, antisemitism, misogyny, and biological essentialism that powered much theorizing and understanding of psychology, sociology, and the “pop culture” of the late 1800s and into WWII (and how these beliefs are still present).

[no-passaran]

Good news!

Finally, France has abolished the law under which it's mandatory for married couples to have sex. (Source)

This comes after a French tribunal in a fault-bases divorce case attributed the blame solely to the woman because she did not want to have sex with her husband— after her health problems and the husband abusing her. She appealed, and in 2019 the French appeals court reiterated that the woman's "continued failure" to have sex with her husband constituted a "serious and repeated breach of marital duties and obligations".

She took the case up to the European Court of Human Rights, defending that the state has no business penalizing her for not wanting to have sex. Last year, against France's resolution, the European Court sided with her, adding that the very existence of a law that makes marital sex mandatory goes against sexual freedom and bodily autonomy. (Source)

This case was supported by the French feminist movement, under the statement "Marriage is not and must not be sexual servitude". The European Court's Resolution also came after the famous case of marital rape of Gisèle Pelicot (for many years, her husband drugged her and raped her and invited other men to rape her while she was unconscious, which at least 50 other men did and recorded themselves doing), which sparked new debate about marital rape.

The report in Parliament said: "Through the recognition of marital duty, French law has legalized having sexual relations under duress—in this case, under the threat of divorce for fault." And, in fact, a man in 2011 had been sentenced by a court to pay 10,000€ in damages for "lack of sexual relations" with his wife.

With the continued pressure from the feminist movement, and after years of fight, yesterday the French Parliament voted to abolish the law that made sex mandatory in marriages.

A day to celebrate for everyone's body autonomy, and particularly women (who have repeatedly been blamed using this law) and the asexual community.

[plinkodiskhorse]

I just got this blazed post on my dashboard

Do NOT participate in this study. It is being run by some of the most biased, transphobic figures in psychology. I cannot stress enough how much harm these people have done in their careers.

Read more here:

Scientists Behind the "Social Contagion" Myth Are Recruiting Trans Young People For Study, Community Leaders Warn

The project is called AYAGDOS—brought to you by the same names behind “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” pseudoscience.

[byjove]

Misogyny is a major factor in the plummeting birth rate in the USA, not the only factor but a major contributing factor. Conservatives blame feminism when it is the extreme wave of reactionary misogyny making women rethink motherhood. This is a common refrain from a lot of childfree women, if they just listened to them, but they won’t.

[byjove]

women: a lot of men in my generation straight up hate women and it makes finding a suitable life partner very difficult. I do not feel safe enough to think of starting a family. I do not want to be permanently entangled with/dependent on a man who treats me like shit.

men: we need to hate women more and make them more unsafe and more dependent on us. this will certainly improve the birth rate. everyone knows that frightened and deeply unhappy women are the most fecund.

[the-truth-within-the-lie]

Breaking: Wyoming Supreme Court Rules Abortion is Healthcare

The court struck down two state bans

I couldn’t be more thrilled to write this sentence: the Wyoming Supreme Court ruled today to protect abortion rights, striking down the state’s two (yes, two!) abortion bans. The judges held that the bans violate the state constitution, which protects people’s right to make their own healthcare decisions.

Just as important, the court states plainly that abortion is healthcare. At a moment when conservatives across the country are trying to divorce abortion from medicine—insisting that “pregnancy isn’t a disease” and that abortion is never medically necessary—this ruling could prove vital for all of us, not just those in Wyoming.

[ralfmaximus]

Wyoming did this!

[butterflyfault]

Wyoming doing something right! 🩷 There must be so many women fighting for themselves there. Let's remind ourselves people did this. Women in Wyoming did this. How can we do what they're doing?

[drst]

Heads up my trans and queer friends, do not participate in this study. Spread the word to stay away;

Skeet from Alejandra Caraballo that says: If you see this, don't participate. It's a rigged study by Lisa Littman and unethical researcher J. Michael Bailey meant to undermine access to care. Spread the word.

[evenmorecrows]

here's an article about this. any statistics of this study are extremely likely to be nitpicked or outright edited for whatever narrative they want to push with it. (specifically, it's likely they're fishing for "evidence" of "rapid-onset gender dysphoria".)

[alpaca-clouds]

For context here as well:

Lisa Littman is the fraud who made the idea of "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" so widespread as it is right now, by doing a "study" based on asking parents from a transphobic parent onlineforum and then concluding that because pretty much all the parents she asked (who, again, were preselected to be transphobic, non-supportive parents) said, their child "suddenly" identified as trans.

And Michael Bailey, while also not having come up with the idea, is the person who spread the idea of "autogynophilia" through really bad papers on the topic.

It should be noted for both, that neither of them actually has a degree in anything related to the field they supposedly study.

[queeranarchism]

Kenneth Zucker, a notorious anti-trans doctor who was fired for submitting trans kids to abusive conversion therapy, is also involved in this study.

Giving this study more 'good answers' isn't going to do any good. None of these people care about research ethics. They are going to cherry pick and twist data to create the most transphobic outcome possible. Don't engage.