What if we started actively disincentivizing landlords letting real estate stay empty rather than renting at reasonable prices? Like, give them a maximum of three months to get a new tenant in, and then they start accumulating fines for the unused space.
And some similar system to disincentivize the ridiculous airbnb market as well. Make it unprofitable to have homes sitting empty in a city where people with jobs find themselves living in tents. Hell, make it unprofitable to have homes sitting empty anywhere that has a homelessness problem.
The fine? The full rent amount theyâre asking for. You think $1700/month for a studio apartment is reasonable? Well, until you get someone into that apartment, youâre going to be fined that same sum every month.
For Airbnb, a lower cost, but still based on how many nights/month the space is unused, and the fine will be based on the asking price per night.
literally email this idea to your local city council representative or similar lowest level government person. if there are meetings that are open to the public, go speak your piece there. an idea like this is very sensible, and this is an issue they are thinking about.
there will be traction. Iâm not saying you can get it to happen, the owners of large complexes have a lot of control over your local government. but itâs not complete control, and good ideas are powerful.
If your city has council meetings open to the public (a lot do!), theyâre probably listed on your cityâs website. Getting a group of people together can be even more powerful, since officials can see itâs at least more than one person who thinks itâs a good idea.
Lower-level local government people are usually happy to hear from you, too. An email pointing out the other places that have tried it and their results could go a long way. Some local government people will even let constituents schedule a short meeting with them where you could present ideas.
To a homophobe, even the most chaste kiss on the cheek between gay people is exactly as disgusting and degenerate as a hardcore BDSM orgy hosted in the town square, so you may as well ally with the BDSM orgy enthusiasts to throw bricks at the cops who are going to try and arrest all of you together anyway.
I once held hands with my husband at an event where my wife was also present, and a concerned parent lectured me about how she didn't want us to "influence" her son. Our icky gay polyam hand holding was such a threat to this woman that she made a point to corner me away from my partners and get me on my own to lecture me about being "indecent." If she had been inclined toward violence, I would have been fucked.
Hand holding. That's all it fucking took.
So catch me at Pride in a leather harness and holding a bat, because if hand holding is all it takes, we owe it to each other to stand together.
The sheer number of LGBT people who have called me a "degenerate" and a "pedophile" and an "abuse apologist" and a "homophobe" and a "woman-beater" over this post, in the less than 24 hours since I have posted it, is proof that it needs to be said.
Call me a degenerate if you want. I don't care. It has always been the degenerates protecting each other when the cops raid our bars and inspect our clothing and haul us away for being cross-dressing, family-destroying, society-polluting, tranny dyke faggot freaks.
I know who I'd rather have on my side, and it's not the self-loathing pieces of shit who would rather destroy their own people than dismantle systems of oppression.
You will never be wholesome and pure enough for the bigots, no matter how much you distance yourself from the kinksters. Once they've killed all us degenerates, they're coming for you next. And we won't be here to fight for you anymore.
I think it's important to remember, as a rule of thumb, if you take advantage of a social service, it actually makes it easier for other people who need that service to access it. Most of the time, when these services get cut, it's because politicians will look at usage and say "see, no one is really using this thing, we can afford to trim the budget for food stamps by at least half". Whereas if you decide to step up and use these programs, even if you feel like you "don't really need it", at bare minimum it's another data point advocates can use to say "hey, look, people are using this thing, this is an important service we are providing, do not cut our funding".
It canât really be, tho, she was an accidental kill. Maybe premeditated if they had killed her boyfriend or fired first, but that isnât what happened. Still, they ARE making their case worse and worse.
They knew she hadnât done anything. They had zero evidence she had broken any law. They lied in court for the pleasure of breaking into her house in the middle of the night with guns and no warning.
Itâs basically state sponsored terrorism or premeditated murder. You pick.
They had zero law enforcement reason to do it. They knew the likely result. They did it for fun because they could. They planned their crimes in advance and committed another crime in furtherance of it in advance.
Like I said, looks pretty premeditated.
Seriously, how do you âaccidentallyâ falsify evidence and commit perjury in order to commit murder? That is a llot of planning an effort, IE: Premeditation.
Iâm pretty sure if I bought bugler tools, stole a loaded gun and broke into someoneâs house and shot someone, Iâd be charged with premeditated murder. How is this different?Â
I also think multiple police turning off their body cameras before a shooting should count as pore-meditation. One could be an accident, but not that many at once. If they werenât planing on murder, why turn their cameras off?
Except they didnât falsify evidence to commit murder, if that were true, why did they let the boyfriend live? He was also the one who fired first, so again, if their goal was to randomly murder, WHY IS HE ALIVE??? Why would they bother sparing one if their goal was to go there and kill? And btw, they did have a stated reason. The boyfriend was involved in selling drugs. They might have falsified the evidence to get the warrant, but given he actually was involved in that, they werenât wrong about the criminal activity.
Itâs different because she wasnât the target. Her boyfriend fired first (justifiably since they didnât answer him when he asked who was there, giving him reason to assume they were a robber), and she was in the line of fire when they fired back. A more accurate comparison would you getting involuntary manslaughter because you were shot at and in the midst of firing back you hit and killed someone who was, again, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Premeditated murder requires the victim to be the person you intended to murder. If you planned to kill one person, but killed someone else, at most youâd get involuntary manslaughter for the actual killing and conspiracy to commit murder and/or attempted murder for the planned attempted murder of another person.
And given your whole thing requires HER to be the target when she was an accidental killing, your whole argument is being tossed.
Reading is fundamental. Also, have you not followed any of the previous reporting?
The boyfriend was not under investigation and he didnât fire fire, as it turns out.
A previous boyfriend of Breonna Taylorâs who she had broken up with and who did not live there was under investigation.
The police investigated Miss. Taylor and found zero evidence of her insolvent in anything illegal, but decided that even though she was innocent they wanted to break into her home without warning in the middle of the night with guns drawn and body cameras off.
so they falsified evidence and lied to a judge for a no knock.
It wasnât accidental that the police falsified evidence because the evidence they could find showed she had not received and packages for her ex. It wasnât accidental that the police lied in court. it is unlikely that all the policemen accidentally turned off their cameras at the same time before they excecated a warrant they knew was gotten under false pretenses.
The only accident was that they didnât know she had a boyfriend who was sleeping there that night.
She was the target.Â
Reporting closer to the time of the murder showed the ex they were investigating turned out to be already in custody.
They knew the supposed target wasnât in the apartment and Post Office confirmed she hadnât received a package (hence the need to falsify evidence she had) and there was zero proof of recent contact with the suspect.
QED: She was the target of the raid even though they knew she was innocent and they had her ex. if they thought heâd stashed something months ago without her knowledge, an ordinary daylight search with a regular warrant would have involved the police committing zero crimes and zero murders.
One of the frustrating things about my film censorship project is how many sources try to take a "censorship is a morally neutral act" viewpoint.
Like, no, motherfucker, censorship is fuckin' bad. I will take a hard line stance on this, I don't give a fuck. If you research the history and application of censorship, it never actually keeps anyone safe, and it is always used as justification to target marginalized people.
If you say that sex is obscene, you can target "sexual deviants," which is always used as coded language for queer people. If you say that violence is reprehensible and not allowed, you have a ready-made excuse to target oppressed people fighting back against their oppressors.
The Hays Code stated that filmmakers couldn't ridicule foreign nations. Did that cut down on racism and xenophobia? No! Joseph Breen, the head censor of the code enforcement office, was an antisemite and used the Code to block production of anti-nazi films, with the justification that they would "offend the Germans." It didn't protect anyone from anything, and it actually enabled further harm!
I think it's really fucking bold of people to give trans men and mascs shade for expecting their transition to look a certain way or like "an anime boy" when baldness, fatness and short height are literally the most common insecurities of cis men and a lot of them go through ridiculous levels to hide or change them
Like "oh, they're angry because they don't look like skinny pretty anime boys", yeah, just like how most men are angry and insecure when they don't meet the masculine ideal, what did you expect?
As a cis gay man, I fucking hate the "you just wanna look like an anime twink uwu kys" take that's been floating around, and for the exact reasons you mentioned. Men do, in fact, have body image issues! Being short or fat or hairy or balding can all cause severe distress, as well as subject you to bullying or make you less likely to get a job. It gets especially bad in the gay community, where fat and hairy people are so mistreated that the bear community was formed explicitly as a counterculture to accept fat and hairy men that were being widespread rejected! Having anxiety about your appearance is normal for any man, but especially men in the queer community who have to worry about being mistreated for their appearance, which is exactly what the "anime boys" take is doing!
And like. I'm sure the people who make that take have justified it to themselves that they're doing it for the greater good. That somehow it is the fault of transmen who are subject to ridiculous body image standards that are at fault for the standards existing. They probably also mock men who go to the gym as being insecure in their masculinity, and they probably do the same for men who use hair loss suppliments. They love mocking men because they convince themselves that it will change masculinity for the better somehow, and finally solve patriarchy. But it isn't the fault of men who conform to body image standards for those standards existing â it is the fault of people who mock them for not conforming in the first place. And that's exactly what these people are doing! They are actively making masculinity more toxic with their actions, and have become enforcers for the patriarchy. And they so muh as stoppped to reflect for an hour they would realize how shitty their being, but their disgust towards men in general and trans men in particular blinds them to the harm that they're doing.
Also, let's be real, the fact that they call these men "anime boys" is pretty fucking telling. They use it to mean "hairless and feminine" and they're mocking it as a ridiculous goal to strive for. It's orientalist in it's implications about the "default" anime boy being feminine, as it takes body standards that are considered normal for men in Japan and emasculates them â and as a Jewish man who has experienced the same thing aimed at my culture's gender norms I can tell you it's a pretty shitty thing to do. But it also frames femininity in men as an unworthy goal â striving for femininity as a man is ludicrous in their eyes, that's the very crux of their argument. And by saying you're lesser for being fat and lesser for wanting to be feminine, they've just recreated "no fats no femmes" as a rallying cry rather than the obvious and blatant bigotry it's always been known to be.
You know what? Fuck you. I am a "men's rights activist."
I'm for trans men having gender-affirming marks on identification and paperwork and still being able to access OBGYN and pregnancy care, and contraceptives.
I'm for all men's restrooms including baby changing stations, because fathers exist and need to change their babies.
I'm for black men having a voice and being seen and heard, and not assumed to be predators for being both black and men.
I'm for fathers gaining custody of their children in the face of a court system which favors the mother, stating that a child should "never be without their mother," granting custody to even the abusive mothers while taking it away from their fathers.
I'm for boys receiving both 'boy' sex education and 'girl' sex education, so they know how periods and pregnancy actually work.
I'm for boys and men giving and receiving emotional checkups, hugs, and everything soft because boys and men both deserve softness. Boys and men deserve to express their emotions healthily. To know how to express emotions healthily.
Men deserve access to care, patience, love and kindness.
Men's Lib is important and there has been pro-feminist men's lib talking about these problems, despite attempts at erasure from anti-feminist MRAs as well as radical feminists.
There is not only a place for, but a need to discuss Men's liberation.
Please don't tag as donations or boost or mutual aid tumblr will silence the post
Hey yall, I hate to do this so soon but it's a family emergency and I could really use your help.
I'm raising money for my uncle so he can get groceries, pay his water and gas bill, pay his car note, and get his heart medication. The pharmacy closest to him doesn't take his insurance so he has to drive across town to pick it up. I gave him about 98.87 but he still need about 657.86 by next Monday.
real freedom includes the right to be a fucked-up dysfunctional weirdo. when you lack this right, your inability or refusal to comply with social norms will be used as a pretext to take away your other freedoms. all of us are fucked-up weirdos on the inside, so with sufficiently hostile and intrusive surveillance anyone can be unpersoned.
Fucked-up dysfunctional weirdo with full rights to and supports available to ensure whatever needs can be functionally met and are desired by said weirdo are filled.
If you don't support the rights of kooks, weirdos, freaks, oddballs, and funky fellows then get out.
The pathologization and criminalization of pecularity doesn't only affect the neurodivergent and the mentally ill, it can and will be used by the state against "normal" people the moment they step out of line.
Not only is it good to support the rights of freaks and weirdos on the grounds of protecting the rights of the neurodivergent and mentally ill, it's also good on the grounds of cutting off a vector of state repression against the general public.
As soon as you start deeming it acceptable to take away the basic rights of "freaks", you open the door to being deemed a "freak" yourself as soon as those in power decide you're inconvenient.
Throwing "weirder" people under the bus will never guarantee you safety. You gotta park the bus so it stops running people over in general.
This is why the right to privacy is so, so crucial.
"Why can't we enhance the surveillance state? Do you have something to hide?"
Maybe I just like being my best, weirdest self without you looking at me. Let live our best lives by leaving us the fuck alone. Live and let live. Mind your business and I'll mind mine.
The invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing cul
Posted without commentary:
On Sept. 17, 2021, my long-distance girlfriend, Lauren, paid a surprise visit to me while a friend filmed my reaction. Three days later, she set the 19-second clip to a hokey Ellie Goulding song and posted it to roughly 200 TikTok followers. The first commentersâLaurenâs close friendsâhad positive things to say. But soon strangersâamong whom the video was less well receivedâbegan commenting, criticizing my reaction time or my being seated on a couch next to friends who happened to be of the opposite sex. âGirl he ainât loyal.â âRed flag! He didnât get up off the couch and jump up and down in excitement.â âBro if my man was on a couch full of girls IM WALKING BACK OUT THE DOOR.â
As comments accusing me of infidelity rolled in, the video quickly became the topic of fierce online debate, Ă la âThe Dress.â I, an ordinary college sophomore, became TikTokâs latest meme: Couch Guy. TikTok users made parody videos, American Eagle advertised a no-effort Couch Guy Halloween costume, and Rolling Stone, E! Online, The Daily Show, and The View all covered the phenomenon. On TikTok, Laurenâs video and the hashtag #CouchGuy, respectively, have received more than 64 million and 1 billion views.
While the Couch Guy meme was lighthearted on its surface, it turned menacing as TikTok users obsessively invaded the lives of Lauren, our friends, and meâpeople with no previous desire for internet fame, let alone infamy. Would-be sleuths conducted what Trevor Noah jokingly called âthe most intense forensic investigation since the Kennedy assassination.â During my tenure as Couch Guy, I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my âbad vibes.â
At times, the investigation even transcended the digital worldâfor instance, when a resident in my apartment building posted a TikTok video, which accumulated 2.3 million views, of himself slipping a note under my door to request an interview. (I did not respond.) One viewer gleefully commented, âEven if this guy turned off his phone, he canât escape the couch guy notifications,â a fact that the 37,600 users who liked it presumably celebrated too. Under another video, in which hall mates of mine promised to confront Couch Guy once they reached 1 million likes (they didnât), a comment suggested that they âsecretly see whoâs coming and going from his placeââand received 17,800 approving likes. The New York Post reported on, and perhaps encouraged, such invasions of my privacy. In an article about the âfrenzy ⌠frantically trying to determine the identityâ of the âmystery manâ behind the meme, the Post asked, âWill the real âcouch guyâ please stand up?â Meanwhile, as internet sleuths took to public online forums to sniff out my name, birthdate, and place of residence, the threat of doxxing loomed over my head.
Exacerbating these invasions of my privacy was the tabloid-style media coverage that I received. Take, for example, one online magazine article that solicited insights from a âbody language expertâ who concluded that my accusers âmight be onto something,â since the âangle of [my] knees signals disinterestâ and my âhands hint that [Iâm] defensive.â This tabloid body language analysisâsomething typically reserved for Kardashians, the British royal family, and other A-listersâmade me, a private citizen who had previously enjoyed his minimal internet presence, an unwilling recipient of the celebrity treatment.
Mercifully, my memedom has died downâinterest in the Google search term âCouch Guyâ peaked on Oct. 5âand I have come to tolerate looks of vague recognition and occasional selfie requests from strangers in public. And my digital scarlet letter has not carried much weight offline, given that Lauren and the other co-stars of the now-infamous video know my true character. Therefore, my anxiety rests only in the prospect that the invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but ratherâas tech writer Ryan Broderick has suggestedâthe latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing culture.
The sleuthing trend sweeping TikTok ramped up following the disappearance of the late Gabby Petito. As armchair TikTok sleuths flexed their investigative muscles, the appâs algorithm boosted content theorizing about what happened to Petito. Madison Kircher of Slateâs ICYMI podcast noted how her âFor You page just decided I simply needed to seeâ TikTok usersâ Gabby Petito videos âover and over again.â It appears that a similar phenomenon occurred with my lower-stakes virality, as I found myself scrolling through countless tweets bemoaning the inescapability of âCouch Guy TikTok.â One user despairingly reported seeing âfive tik toks back to back on my [For You page] about couch guy.â (I assure you, though, that nobody despised Couch Guyâs omnipresence more than myself.)
The most recent target of the appâs emerging investigative spirit was Sabrina Prater, a 34-year-old contractor and trans woman, who went viral in November after posting a video of herself dancing in a basement midrenovation. The videoâs virality began with parody videos, but quickly veered into the realm of conspiracy theory due to (you guessed it) the videoâs apparent âbad vibesââat which point I got a dreadful sense of dĂŠjĂ vu. As Praterâs video climbed to 22 million views and internet sleuths came together to form a r/WhosSabrinaPrater community on Reddit, Prater faced baseless murder accusations, transphobic comparisons to Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, and overzealous vigilantes who threatened to go to her neighborhood to investigate further. This incident reveals the harmful potential of TikTok sleuthing. One expert aptly summed up the Prater saga to Rolling Stone: âIt was like watching true crime, internet sleuthing, conspiracy theories, and transphobia collide in a car crash.â
Given the apparent tendency of the TikTok algorithm to present viral spectacles to a user base increasingly hungry for content to analyze forensically, there will inevitably be more Couch Guys or Praters in the future. When they appear on your For You page, I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve. As users focused their collective magnifying glass on Lauren, my friends, and meâcomparing their sleuthing to âwatching a soap opera and knowing who the bad guy isââit felt like the entertainment value of the meme began to overshadow our humanity. Stirred to make a TikTok of my own to quell the increasing hate, I posted a video reminding the sleuths that ânot everything is true crimeââwhich commenters resoundingly deemed âgaslighting.â Laurenâs videos requesting that the armchair investigation stop were similarly dismissed as more evidence of my success as a manipulator, and my friendsâ entreaties to respect our privacy, too, fell on deaf ears.
Certainly, noncelebrities have long unwillingly become public figures, and digital pile-ons have existed in some form since the dawn of the digital ageâjust ask Monica Lewinsky. But on TikTok, algorithmic feedback loops and the nature of the For You page make it easier than ever for regular people to be thrust against their wishes into the limelight. And the extent of our collective power is less obvious online, where pile-ons are delivered, as journalist Jon Ronson put it, âlike remotely administered drone strikes.â On the receiving end of the barrage, however, as one finds their reputation challenged, body language hyperanalyzed, and privacy invaded, the severity of our collective power is made much too clear.
fun fact: lauren, the girl mentioned in the piece, still gets harassing comments on every single video she posts, to this day. her most recent video is from a few days ago (september 2022) and there are literally dozens of comments still referencing the incident, calling her 'embarassing' and 'gullible' for not breaking up with her high school sweetheart over some amateur tiktok body language analysis of a ten second clip. this one is just her dancing, from a couple weeks ago, and the comments are full of people insulting her appearance, calling her annoying, gleefully telling her they're excited to hear about her breakup. it has been nearly a full year since the original video went viral.
it's very telling that this entire incident was ostensibly designed around helping her; stopping a girl from getting cheated on, and the instant she didn't play along, she became a victim of this harassment campaign as well. this had nothing to do with helping anyone, and was entirely about the glee of putting someone- a completely innocent person!- in the stocks. awful but very telling case study.
seriously wondering if we can call the uk a democracy anymore. we have a prime minister that less than 0.3% of the population voted for, we have a new king that we have no say on, people are getting arrested for protesting against the monarchy under the excuse of âoffending someoneâ and we are effectively having a day of mourning forced upon us for the funeral with important hospital appointments cancelled and people even getting kicked out of holiday lettings for the day. this reads like a dystopian world where a dictator has died, not something happening now in a supposed democratic country
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