Palestinian Men Should Not Have To Repeatedly Hold Up Pictures Of Their Family Struggling Through A Genocide,

Palestinian men should not have to repeatedly hold up pictures of their family struggling through a genocide, for us to care about them. Fundraisers conducted by/for Palestinian men, should not have to repeatedly refer to their mothers, sisters, wives and children, to make us realize their humanity, their vulnerability. Enough. Isn't it enough after so many months? Hadn't it always been enough?

NYC!!! ICE IS OUT RIGHT NOW!

IF YOU KNOW ANY OTHER CHECK POINTS PLS REBLOG WITH THE INFO

47K notes View Post

minirosebush

5 years ago

you cant reclaim slurs that arent yours. if you get called the sand n-slur or prarie n-slur you CANNOT reclaim the n-slur. like. period. i dont know why this is so difficult to comprehend

5K notes View Post

minirosebush

10 months ago

Twitter thread by Alec Karakatsanis
(@equalityAlec)
11 Jul 24

THREAD. I didn't fully know what to expect when I started digging into over a decade of records, statements, financial data, and other information about police body cameras. I suspected it to be troubling, but what I found shocked even me.

I also examined hundreds of news articles about police body cameras. The result? The public campaign to sell police body cameras as a liberal "reform" is one of the great frauds of modern domestic U.S. propaganda. It carries profound lessons for anyone who cares about democracy.

First, a fact more people should know is that police leaders and prosecutors desperately *wanted* body cameras for years. They had a problem though: cops couldn't get hundreds of millions of $$$ in funding for them. So how did police finally get them?

After the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson ten years ago generated massive public outrage over police violence, police and multi-billion dollar surveillance companies realized they had an opportunity.

They realized that while they'd been unable to get local governments to pay billions for the surveillance bonanza before, now they could partner with "reformers" to pitch body cameras as a *solution* to police violence. Liberal "reformers" were a perfect target/accomplice.

The money started flowing. President Obama called for hundreds of millions in cash from the feds to supplement local and state spending, which liberal leaders and cops championed. The market value of the main companies grew by billions, with exploding yearly sales.
[image of a graph. Title: "Soaring Body Camera Sales" Strap: Sales of body-worn cameras and related products from Avon, the largest manufacturer of tjee equipment.
The x marks the amount of spending while y denotes the years. The graph shows a line beginning from approximately USD 10 million in 2013, curve dramatically upward through the consecutive years until it ends at USD 192 million in 2018.]

Almost every news article published for the following decade omitted something crucial: police and prosecutors wanted the cameras not because it would make them "accountable" and "transparent" but for *exactly the opposite reasons.*

Police and their industry allies used the news media to focus the public on the supposed need to capture police violence on video. They said police lacked funding for tech that could provide the public with “accountability" and "transparency."

In reality, according to their own statements, they sought the greatest expansion of surveillance infrastructure in modern policing history, and dreamed of lucrative contracts to link the new video with AI facial and voice recognition software and predictive policing algorithms.

For example, they wanted an easy tool that cops could deploy at protests to scan the crowd and know who is there and who is associating with who based on facial recognition. They wanted to be able to share this intelligence about protestors in massive profitable databases.

Cops/prosecutors also wanted them because it's the most powerful new form of evidence: outward looking videos that bureaucrats could create, direct, curate, edit, and control both in terms of what's captured, what's left out, and at which political moment it's publicly released.

Body camera videos are now routinely used in almost every prosecutor office in the U.S. as evidence to get mostly poor people to quickly plead guilty to things like drug possession and trespassing. They are almost never used against police officers.

To the contrary, the videos are often given privately to cops prior to their internal statements about controversial incidents in which they used violence to create and standardize initial police narratives with the goal of reducing potential civil and criminal liability.

The benefits of body cameras to the punishment bureaucracy and big corporations unfolded exactly as police chiefs and corporate sales representatives from the companies discussed the devices over a decade ago when formulating their goals *before* Michael Brown’s killing.

Most profoundly, though, body cameras served a propaganda function. They steer public away from *systemic* questions about the role of armed government agents, why they only enforce some crimes against some people, why they are in certain neighborhoods in the first place, etc

With the explosion of cameras, police killed more and more people each year. Exactly as everyone on the inside knew, cameras didn't make police less violent. A little known fact: the federal government's own review of studies shows body cameras *do not make police less violent*!

For example, each year since George Floyd was killed --captured in a useful angle horrifically on video by a bystander not the police body camera--police have killed more people than they did the year before despite huge new sums spent on body cameras.

There are so many fascinating details in this story. You can read my full article here explaining this entire process in detail in the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation: campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/files/202…

UPDATE: I've been tracking hundreds of coordinated far-right replies and quote-tweets. It's interesting for a few reasons. First, many of them assert ludicrous falsities about basic facts. Second, many fundamentally misunderstand the arguments. But most important:

The scope and silliness of the right-wing replies all helps make one of the core points: liberals who supported body cameras as "reform" should pay attention to who is defending this lucrative, authoritarian tech and the hateful nonsense they are spewing.

Link to thread.

Link to article.

Link to author's bio.

Alt text enabled on all images.

13K notes View Post

minirosebush

6 months ago

now that i have your attention! mohammed ayesh (@ayeshjourney) vets campaigns on the ground for people trapped in gaza. he helps run the blog @/gaza-evacuation-funds and vets campaigns for @/nabulsi and @/el-shab-hussein. he does an incredible amount of work to help so many people and now he and his family need our help.

mohammed has launched a gofundme campaign to help his younger brother yasser, who has a cochlear implant that needs repairing. their campaign is very low on funds. the current short-term goal is £5,000 and they have raised £2,492. please consider donating even £5 if it's within your means and please share this post! i hope we can work together to help mohammed and his family!

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Mohammed family, organized by Shelley Gordon

Hi my name is Shelley and I am fundraising on behalf of Mohammed and his family here is their … Shelley Gordon needs your support for He

2K notes View Post

minirosebush

9 months ago

happy birthday james baldwin by god you would’ve been deeply disappointed by the state of the world today but always saddling forth with hope and love and the care of an unbridled honesty that i aspire to

3K notes View Post

minirosebush

2 years ago

Purple whimsigothic inspiration

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6

5K notes View Post

minirosebush

5 years ago

love the world bc like, we have less than 20 years before climate change completely starts destroying society and people are like “lets vote in democrats!! remember to vote!! Maybe we can convince the corporations to stop being so mean and destroying the planet!! stop using disposable straws!!”

635 notes View Post