we live forever and we love to live

♪　canadian marxist-leninist ・ rats and crocheting ・ it/they ・ agender　♪

[kropotkindersurprise]

July 22, 2026 - People around the USA are taking down Flock AI surveillance cameras. [video]

[noneedtofearorhope]

DeFlock

Find license plate readers (LPRs) near you.

[nevermindirah]

direct action works!!

physically interfering with the cameras is highly effective but obviously it's not a type of activism that's accessible to everyone — so if like me you think warrentless surveillance is never ever ever a reasonable thing for a government to do, but you're also like me and can't personally climb camera poles to dismantle that shit:

check out the August 16-22 week of action!

National Week of Action Against ALPRs | DeFlock

Mass surveillance doesn't equal safety. Join the movement to dismantle automated license plate readers in our communities.

big and small cities all over the US (and one so far in Canada!) are holding events like education sessions, marches, and public lobbying meetings with the local governments and police departments that decide whether to spend taxpayer money on warrantless surveillance. maybe my city and yours can join the nearly 100 places that have already rejected or ended contracts for mass privacy violation cameras.

[liminal-librarian]

They don't just share with governments; they share with anyone, including foreign organisations. Mass surveillance as a service == Spys for the highest bidder.

[kropotkindersurprise]

^^ average american voter's response when their fascist government allies with their fascist tech companies to spy on them

"foreign organisations" are the least of americans' worries, keep your dumbass xenophobic paranoia off my posts.

[liminal-librarian]

Sorry, I was trying to add "yes, and" to a post with important information and make the topic more accessible to all viewers. Perhaps some cannot see that a particular party (the camera company, the city where the camera is located) having access to the data is a problem, but can see the problem more clearly when some other organisation does.

The problem most frightening to me is abusive ex's having ready access to this sort of information.

Though perhaps the problem most socially close to me is controlling parents (who happen to work for a certain search provider) sending police to break into my house to harass their adult child for choosing to go no contact. (Though in that case, all parties already knew where the adult was living, but filing a missing person report and more to weaponise bureaucracy was a step too far; she would totally pay to track his license plate number/activities if he ever escapes her control far enough to own a car/carry insurance.)

[kropotkindersurprise]

Yes, and cops have already been caught stalking their wives, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, ex-girlfriends' new boyfriends, etc with this.

Texas police have been caught tracking a woman's car across multiple states because they suspected her of having had an abortion. They tracked her through states where abortion is legal.

There's no need to invoke the specter of scary other countries spying on you. Your local PD is your enemy, your own government is your enemy, not China or whatever other scary country you may have in mind.

[txttletale]

i have a copyright related question that i was hoping you could help me wrap my head around, because i agree with you basically all of the time on that matter, but something about this specific scenario is giving me a bit of a hangup (not that we should KEEP copyright because of this specific scenario but that i dont know what should be done instead). i also apologize in advance there definitely used to be a post about this that i wish i could link to but i cant find it so this ask is going to be very long. the long and short of it is there used to be a "band" called new jersey weather report. they released an album and some other stuff, there were related side projects too. they sold their stuff on bandcamp one of my good friends has 1 of 12 cassettes ever produced by them. they were part of a virtual festival in minecraft, and the vod got flagged for copyright infringement for a completely different band. as it turns out, all of new jersey weather report's (and all of their side projects') music was completely stolen from other groups - i know white oak and the planet you were 2 of them but there may have been more idr. and by completely stolen i mean absolutely no editing, just changed the names of the songs, and no attribution to the original artists at all. and i know this kind of thing happens legally all the time under the current copyright system anyways and we dont have any recourse for it now either. but it seems like... disingenuous to say that under a copyright-less system that it would be perfectly acceptable to do exactly that? like if we didnt have copyright, and njwr did what they did, but this time just no one ever found out. does that make it ok? and like im framing this around njwr because its something that i know happened but i guess it would apply to anything subject to copyright - if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just... fine?

if i just started printing like, the shining, or the name of the rose or whatever, but changed only the title and said i wrote it, is that just… fine?

i mean, i don't think that's fine--because you are lying to people. the copying is not the morally fraught aspect of this--i think it is completely morally fine to print the shining and evne to make money off it; it's when you start lying about the authorship that you start causing harm. i think this sort of deception has three direct and evident harms:

you are denying the original author credit for their work. it is natural, when you have made something, to feel proud and want to be recognized for it--it is hurtful to see people enjoying your work without feeling credited. depending on the context, being denied credits in this way can also be a material harm; in many artistic industries, credits and reputation are crucial to finding jobs and opportunities

you are denying those who enjoy the work the opportunity to understand its actual context. if someone reads the shining, they can go on to find the rest of steven king's ouvre; they can see what he has cited as his influences and go back and read those. the circumstances of a work's production, its position in an artist's broader body of work--all this epitext is shorn off completely when you deceive someone about the origin of a work

you are committing an act of vandalism against the culture more completely; if your version of the work becomes more notable than the original, you build a false citation into the history of the medium. you create a dead end, a cul-de-sac of the rich interconnectness of culture where something is put into a position it doesn't actually occupy. in the worst cases, where this behaviour mixes with e.g. colonialism, racism, etc. you participate in actively writing oppressed peoples and their culture out of cultural memory

but this has nothing to do with copyright; none of these harms are caused by the act of reproduction. an opposition to plagiarism is completely in line with a copyright abolitionist stance, because the harms of plagiarism stem from a particular intentional deception around crediting rather than from breaking copyright laws

[tamamita]

I'm so glad this man is living in fear now

[gulyas069]

it is insanely funny that he's so mad with fear and decadence that he's deploying missile defense systems to his golfing

[hagiomoto]

[zoesupreme]

wait so Trump thought his plane was gonna be blown up by Iran while he was leaving Turkey so he secretly got on a different plane and let his cabinet and staff and the press corps take off on Air Force One to maybe die? lmao

and now his press secretary is resigning bc she rightfully was like what the hell man lol

[adorableanimus]

"its still racist even if you act like youre joking"- something a shockingly few amount of people understand

[bitchautism]

it does actually bother me whenever it's like... a bunch of guys and 1 girl. like the smurfs. that's weird. the minions are also weird for it being all guys. stop doing this

[bitchautism]

and yes I am saying your fictional characters can only ever be women now. and you have to be normal about it . no misogynistic jokes

[snekdood]

had me in the first half, actually i think its weird to do either way.

[bitchautism]

wow and I really care about your opinion, random man on the Internet. thank you so much for informing me that having an all male cast (very common, very misogynistic) is just as bad as having an all female cast (very uncommon and awesome). I cannot wait to hear more unwanted and unneeded opinions from you, but unfortunately you must be blocked

[butchbubbles]

reblog that post about Black people, whitey

[butchbubbles]

i mean "posts about Black people" in a broad sense, that can mean anything from struggles to Black joy, and when you see the notes, most of the time it’s double digits, three if I'm being generous.

start being comfortable posting Black people's words in your blogs, the same way you'll reblog posts about transness, gayness, disability, because these specific topics can affect you

start actually giving a fuck about Black folks and reblogging our words is the barest minimum

[eraserheadadult]

the situation with harry potter is kind of unprecedented in some ways imo because it is maybe the largest media franchise in history to be created & owned by a single person who still has direct creative control over it. who is also a billionaire with significant cultural/political influence. like the usual "no ethical consumption under capitalism" type excuses shatter on impact when the bigoted author in question is logging onto twitter every day saying explicitly that when you buy the tim hortons ravenclaw donut she is using your donut money to fund the genocide of trans people. like with big franchises usually there's at least a little more diffusion of responsibility than this

[innerchildabortionclinic]

I do always think about the family dynamics in these situations 👀

[scoobagirl-deactivated20210101]

Lenin by Langston Hughes

Lenin walks around the world.

Frontiers cannot bar him.

Neither barracks nor barricades impede.

Nor does barbed wire scar him.

Lenin walks around the world.

Black, brown, and white receive him.

Language is no barrier.

The strangest tongues believe him.

Lenin walks around the world.

The sun sets like a scar.

Between the darkness and the dawn

There rises a red star.

[innerchildabortionclinic]

[innerchildabortionclinic]

fishcat morning everyone

[smoky-impressions]

at what age do fishkitties start losing their legs to develop fins for better mobility in their underwater world? 🤔

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[santhipoma]

[glasshomewrecker]

Everyone should be aware of nitter.net

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

Similarly, imginn.com works for most Instagram addresses. I still haven’t found one for Facebook.

[website-enjoyer]

whether someone uses stalinist as a pejorative or as a badge of notoriety it is seemingly inevitable that they eventually apply the label to a political line that was in fact most prominently voiced by trotsky

[tsunflowers]

reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way

[coherentnow]

one of my favorite parts of anna karenina addressed this. as i remember it, a landowner (levin?) basically had a midlife crisis and started working the fields. the farmhands were pretty confused and annoyed at this relatively weak, ineffective guy playacting as a farmhand. he was in the way, had no idea what he was doing, didn't understand their micro culture (esp. things like what they liked to talk about and what they found funny) and most of all, he was...THEIR BOSS.

[marzipanandminutiae]

this is why I get annoyed by people being like "why is the noble heroine in this 19th-century novel lonely? why does she say she's all alone? her maid is there! ugh! so dehumanizing!!!!"

she is the maid's BOSS

they are not FRIENDS

the maid probably does not DESIRE her friendship

the servants are not your confidants in this scenario. IRL, the notion of the Loyal Family Retainer was most common in sentimental literature for the employing class (which btw was like upper-working-class on up, although the lower you go, the more work the family would be doing alongside them) and sometimes weaponized by them to try and get extra emotional or physical labor out of domestic workers

did emotional intimacy develop sometimes? absolutely- and it was often encouraged for upper-class 19th-century children in the US and UK, who could spend a lot of time with their nanny and in the servants' sphere in general. was classism a factor? 100%.

but it's not dehumanizing to be like "my employee is not my BFF"

[occidentalist]

I learned a very long time ago that I could post in English on the Anglo internet about my experience as a sexual minority in the #middleeastandnorthafrica region. I could vent about every slight or slur, every indiscretion, all the doors that might not have closed in my face had I not been who I am. But that all it would do is earn me a seat at a table half the world away, a seat that I would lose the second I said “but my people are still human. But we are Arab women before we are queer women. But we are muslim before we are trans women. But we are imperialised subjects of the periphery before we are bisexuals. But we are ‘combat-aged males’ before we are gay men and boys.” A seat that I could only keep if I show a willingness to betray my people. And I will not. I do not want it. The price is too steep and the value too low.

I have come to know now that this western voraciousness for our stories was never an impulse born out of empathy; it has always been little more than a gathering of intel, of reasons to hate us and to justify the destruction of our bodies and the pillaging of our lands and the looting of our resources. So I no longer see the utility in being one more primary source for the proverbial NYT opinion editorial manufacturing consent for the latest campaign of imperial slaughter in my backyard on account of our inherent backwardness.

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

One maladaptive coping mechanism that turns very toxic when you’re not defending against abuse is to read any uncomfortable situation as a deliberate personal attack, and sometimes extrapolate one incident into a whole pattern of malicious intent.

Examples:

“Hey, I have a headache, could you please lower your voice a little?” - “FINE I guess I just won’t say anything at all!”

“Hey thanks for inviting me, but I’m not feeling well, so I’m sorry but I can’t make it. Maybe (x day) instead?” - “Sorry for asking! I guess I’m just too needy for you!”

(Someone forgets to call you back.) - “Yeah I don’t think we’re friends anymore, she acts like she hates me.”

“Hey, what you just said about me was literally not true. Why did you say that?” - “Right, I’m just a piece of shit who should never talk at all I guess!”

“I don’t really feel like sex tonight.” - “Sorry I’m so repulsive to you!”

“You really hurt my feelings. Why did you do that?” - ”Go ahead and just break up with me, I know you’ve been wanting to.”

This kind of response escalates an interaction from a two-way conversation about a specific problem into a fight about your own self-worth. Instead of responding to what’s actually happening or trying to figure out whether an attack was intended, this response immediately changes the conversation into a defensive argument where the only relevant question is if you’re an okay person that people care about.

Like I get feeling this kind of reaction, I get having a knee-jerk response of fear and shame and self-loathing. Sometimes when you’re feeling vulnerable it is very, very difficult not to read super far into anything negative. Sometimes it just reflects off all your internal fears and amplifies inside of you until a polite “no” feels like everyone you’ve ever liked is telling you they hate you.

But it is possible, with some work, to separate your feelings from your actual knowledge of the situation. It’s possible to feel one thing in your heart and still recognize with your mind that the reality is different. You can learn to notice the difference between someone actually attacking you and something just feeling like an attack because you’re extra vulnerable.

You can also learn not to react based solely on your feelings. You can learn to take another person’s actual words and actions into account and respond based on what you think - not just feel - their intent actually was. That work is as necessary as it is difficult.  

People need to be able to tell you things that aren’t overwhelmingly positive without you making them feel guilty for saying anything and treating their concerns as an attack.

Otherwise, you wind up in a position where they can’t be honest with you. They can’t say no to you, can’t tell you when something you do hurts or scares them, can’t point out worrying things as friends do to take care of each other, can’t bring up their own needs without the conversation devolving into comforting you again.

This habit interacts especially badly with the way many other trauma survivors are terrified of upsetting anyone – when your reaction to them bringing up problems or saying no is consistently disproportionate, they may find it easier to just do what you want even against their own will.

It is possible to deal with those awful feelings and get the comfort you need without resorting to lashing out when you feel bad. It’s okay to be honest about the fact your emotions don’t always line up with reality so people know what you’re going through. It’s okay to just ask for the emotional support you need or for confirmation that they mean what they say.

You may even find that when you make a continuous effort not to treat these uncomfortable experiences as crises, they deescalate and you wind up feeling more secure each time.

Look, this coping mechanism, like many forms of manipulation, is a useful survival tool in the context of an abusive relationship where you really are being attacked insidiously, and where you can’t just ask for comfort and expect to get it. But if you are no longer in that kind of situation, it’s time to reevaluate the usefulness/danger ratio and figure out what other strategies might be better for you and the people you love.

[dissociacrip]

you really shouldn't just arbitrarily give fictional characters - whether this is OCs or fanart, fanfic, etc. - mobility aids tbqh you actually have to think about/research what issues are affecting them that require the usage of said mobility aid, what type of mobility aid that would best suit their specific needs (or that they have access to within the constraints of the story and how it benefits them) and what customization said aid might specifically require (e.g. canes have different grips and bases for varying needs), whether said character might own/use multiple kinds of mobility aids depending on the day and the symptoms they're dealing with, whether they need to use it all the time or only in specific circumstances, etc. you really can't just slap a cane on a fictional character and call it a day then expect that to count as good enough or authentic representation(tm).

[dissociacrip]

this DOESN'T mean that characters always have to be using the "correct" mobility aids in the "correct" way - this just means that the incorrectness should be a decision on your part rather than an accident due to not knowing better. for example, a character using a cheap hospital wheelchair because in-universe they don't have any way to get their hands on a better one, which can be for a variety of reasons: they might be severely impoverished or otherwise have impeded access to getting one through financial or medical means, they might exist in a post-apocalyptic setting where they've been forced to use the only wheelchair that they can scavenge for themselves, the reality that many people who use mobility aids do so in a way that doesn't fit into the mold of how they "should" even if there are consequences that might bring about, etc. that's still actually considering what it means for the character in question, which is really just how you solidly write/design a character at the end of the day.

[dissociacrip]

this post is not about upper limb prostheses and you should read this before writing or designing a character with upper limb prostheses.