woodlandhollow

[woodlandhollow]

I understand the impulse behind that post about legalizing polyamorous marriage everywhere but the fact that marriage is so economically important and the fact that it determines which forms of long-term relationships are considered acceptable within society should make you question the institution of marriage and understand it as a tool of class society. We don't need to expand the institution of marriage so it includes gay people, polyamorous people, etc, we need to abolish marriage entirely and make it so that people don't need to be married to be economically or personally secure

[woodlandhollow]

you literally cannot criticise anything in usa bc its full of the thinnest skinned people in the world for real you cannot make anodyne statements like "weapons company bad" without some chump being like omg what if someones dad worked for a weapons company you're making them ashamed googaga no way this is the land of free speech

[woodlandhollow]

white people really don’t seem to understand that prison abolition is essential to decolonization and anti-racism activism

the prison system is a colonist invention that disproportionately imprisons people of colour and exploits them for labour that they are paid cents for

I encourage all of you, but especially white people, to research prison abolition. here are some resources to get you started:

An Indigenous Abolitionist’s Study Guide

Why COVID-19 shows it’s time to consider prison abolition

Trans liberation can’t happen until we abolish prisons

The case for abolition

Emancipation day march in downtown Toronto calls for abolition of prison system

[woodlandhollow]

there are lots of white ppl who think they're not racist because they're lgbt. if you're oppressed because of gender non-conformity relative to your culture, that culture is a part of how you conceptualize gender. whiteness is not a 'null' or 'default' category and is created by an arbitrary set of physical and cultural differences, defined by your forefathers and held in place by your kin and kith. and a whoooole lotta money.

lots of unfortunate, archaic concepts are held in place by people's faith in these institutions. good news is, you can educate yourself, share community with people of color, make an actual effort to understand them. read some books, learn some history, talk to people about how their lives differ from yours so you can zoom out from your perspective and see things as they are.

[woodlandhollow]

[woodlandhollow]

there's a fly on my taskbar but before i realised that i had a moment of "what new software did i add"

[woodlandhollow]

EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????

IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN

IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"

AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS

LIKE READ THIS SHIT

WHAT THE FUCK MOTHER NATURE

[woodlandhollow]

But moooom! 😒

[woodlandhollow]

sometimes your disability will stand in your way. sometimes something isn’t achievable because of that, and that isn’t your fault.

[woodlandhollow]

truly the end goal is not "my close friends aren't annoyed by me and it's all in my head, they're my friends and they love me", it's "sometimes I do annoy my close friends, just as the people I love most will also annoy me sometimes, because this is normal, and we will continue to stay friends, and they're not going to want to immediately cut me out of their life if I do something annoying once in a while"

[woodlandhollow]

the adventure begins

[woodlandhollow]

There is no non-violent solution to oppression and exploitation. The advocates of non-violent civil disobedience are shot at and killed until the only groups left are militants and the only solution towards justice that remains is a violent one. If the oppressor and their apologists actually believed non-violent disobedience was the only acceptable response for the oppressed, they wouldn’t support the wholesale murder of non-violent activists and non-politically radicalized civilians. They create the conditions for their own violent overthrow.

[woodlandhollow]

When Palestinians, trans women, and Black people outright call people out on their lack of care/active malicious behaviour towards them without kissing their feet, or merely exist online in the vicinity of their oppressers, staff sees it as a crime that needs to be punished with (often permanent) deletion/banning.

When the users of Tumblr band together to threaten to sick the FBI on Palestinian users asking for help with evacuation costs and/or survival in the middle of a genocide, or report a trans woman for making a sex joke, or harass a Black person for merely breathing in their presence, staff sees this as sacred free speech and does nothing.

It's evil is what it is

[woodlandhollow]

(3 October 2024)

“There is a difference between tools that are publicly accessible, like Google Street View, and things that are searchable,” Weist says. While conducting her work, Weist ran multiple searches for words and popular terms, which found results far beyond license plates. In data she shared with WIRED, a search for “Planned Parenthood,” for instance, returned stickers on cars, on bumpers, and in windows, both for and against the reproductive health services organization. Civil liberties groups have already raised concerns about how license-plate-reader data could be weaponized against those seeking abortion.

Weist says she is concerned with how the search tools could be misused when there is increasing political violence and divisiveness in society. While not linked to license plate data, one law enforcement official in Ohio recently said people should “write down” the addresses of people who display yard signs supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, exemplifying how a searchable database of citizens’ political affiliations could be abused.

A 2016 report by the Associated Press revealed widespread misuse of confidential law enforcement databases by police officers nationwide. In 2022, WIRED revealed that hundreds of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and contractors were investigated for abusing similar databases, including LPR systems. The alleged misconduct in both reports ranged from stalking and harassment to sharing information with criminals.

While people place signs in their lawns or bumper stickers on their cars to inform people of their views and potentially to influence those around them, the ACLU’s Stanley says it is intended for “human-scale visibility,” not that of machines. “Perhaps they want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they don't necessarily want to be logged into a nationwide database that’s accessible to police authorities,” Stanley says.

…

License-plate-recognition systems have flourished in recent years as cameras have become smaller and machine-learning algorithms have improved. These systems, such as DRN and rival Flock, mark part of a change in the way people are surveilled as they move around cities and neighborhoods.

Increasingly, CCTV cameras are being equipped with AI to monitor people’s movements and even detect their emotions. The systems have the potential to alert officials, who may not be able to constantly monitor CCTV footage, to real-world events. However, whether license plate recognition can reduce crime has been questioned.

“When government or private companies promote license plate readers, they make it sound like the technology is only looking for lawbreakers or people suspected of stealing a car or involved in an amber alert, but that’s just not how the technology works,” says Dave Maass, the director of investigations at civil liberties group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The technology collects everyone's data and stores that data often for immense periods of time.”

Over time, the technology may become more capable, too. Maass, who has long researched license-plate-recognition systems, says companies are now trying to do “vehicle fingerprinting,” where they determine the make, model, and year of the vehicle based on its shape and also determine if there’s damage to the vehicle. DRN’s product pages say one upcoming update will allow insurance companies to see if a car is being used for ride-sharing.

“The way that the country is set up was to protect citizens from government overreach, but there’s not a lot put in place to protect us from private actors who are engaged in business meant to make money,” Nicole McConlogue, an associate professor of law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, who has researched license-plate-surveillance systems and their potential for discrimination.

“The volume that they’re able to do this in is what makes it really troubling,” McConlogue says of vehicles moving around streets collecting images. “When you do that, you're carrying the incentives of the people that are collecting the data. But also, in the United States, you’re carrying with it the legacy of segregation and redlining, because that left a mark on the composition of neighborhoods.”

[woodlandhollow]

ghost of the valley

sticker design based on my sis telling me my favorite flower (lily of the valleys) look like ghosts

[woodlandhollow]

starstruck (soft)

[woodlandhollow]

Marisol Muro