To being an "us", for once

hey parents: there is literally no non-abusive reason a person would want the ability to read someone’s emails, track their location, and go through their calls and text messages without their knowledge or consent.

I want to address the person who tagged this “what if they’re missing??”

Google Trusted Contacts.

that’s it, that’s the answer.

what this does is allow you to set up a list of people who are able to request your location. when they do so, you have five minutes to either refuse or grant the request. if you don’t respond within five minutes, the request is automatically accepted, in case you’re hurt or otherwise unable to get to your phone. your trusted contacts can also see how recently you used your device.

in other words: if someone genuinely wants to know if you’re okay, they can check the app and see that you’ve used your phone five minutes ago, and that can be the end of it. if they want to be doubly sure, or it says you haven’t used your phone recently, they can request your location. if you want them to know where you are, or you can’t answer, they’ll have your exact location within five minutes. if you don’t want them to know where you are, you click deny, and they still see that you got the request and responded to it, meaning, again, they know you’re okay. this is safety with accountability: you can’t track someone’s location without their consent unless they fail to respond to the notification, and you can’t do it without them knowing about it.

if you want to track a friend or loved one for genuine safety reasons, set this up. it gives you all the access you need if your concern is actually for the other person’s well-being, rather than a desire for control. (it’s not out for iOS yet, but Google says that’s coming soon).

(also: don’t be the jackass that makes a rule that someone has to accept all your location requests because that makes you just as bad as the people who install tracking shit covertly.)

It’s not abusive in any way for a parent to want to know where their underage child is and who they’re talking to, and saying so is a foul misuse of the term “abuse”.

anyway like I said there is literally no non-abusive reason a person would want the ability to read someone’s emails, track their location, and go through their calls and text messages without their knowledge or consent

I’m glad you live in a world where adults don’t groom kids on the net, or by calling them or sending them text messages.

I live in this world:

a world where parents are an order of magnitude more dangerous to children than “adults grooming them on the internet”, and giving parents unchecked powers of surveillance is for that reason alone more likely to put kids at risk than to keep them safe.

I live in this world:

a world where the psychologically debilitating effects of surveillance are well-established and well-known, yet adults do everything in their power to invade young people’s privacy and then ask dumbass questions like “why are kids so anxious?” and come up with answers like “it’s probably because of selfies”

I live in this world:

a world where invasion of privacy is recognized as an integral part of emotional abuse, but parents still get away with it because “they’re just doing it to keep them safe uwu~”, despite the fact that this is the same line the goddamn NSA gives us and most of us don’t take that sack of lies from them.

tldr, I live in a world where you’re not just wrong, you’re promoting attitudes that are actively harmful and you need to sit down, shut up, and listen when people are trying to educate you about issues of justice and safety.

Just so everyone knows, the Trusted Contacts app has been defunct since 2020, so that is not a viable option for… whatever it was for, as I’m not quite sure, I just know it’s no longer functional.

You wanna keep your kids safe?

Fucking talk to them like they are people, teach them internet safety, listen kindly and without judgement when they come to you, offer advice when it’s needed, ask if they want or need you to step in before you do if it’s not an immediate threat.

Before my kids ever got even restricted access to the internet I would tell them why we were doing a thing they didn’t like, like getting shots, and we had talks about internet safety. I talked with them about why they got restricted access when they did get it. We talk now over it sometimes just to be sure they remember. I don’t go into their phones and devices and they actually come to me with their problems if they have any.

Meanwhile, for myself I had my email hacked into and my phone tracker forably activated by my father when I was in my 20s and had moved two states away in part to flee his overbearing invasion of privacy. I spent my teen years finding new ways to dodge and thwart him, I hid random porn in random files ALL over my computer until my 30s as a “fuck you” for if he broke into it again somehow and I do not talk to him now.

Fucking respect your kids and their privacy.

— Morgan Jerkins, The Quiet Racism of Instagram Filters

hi uh i keep seeing this being debated on tiktok and as your resident adult with a history of infertility who knows just.. way too much about pregnancy and hcg tests: if you are capable of getting pregnant, you really REALLY need to understand how drugstore pregnancy tests work. if there is a line, no matter how faint, that test is POSITIVE. I’ve seen people test positive and get a negative or start their period a few days later and be like “it must have been a false positive”. actual false positives are extremely rare. what most likely happened is something called a ‘chemical pregnancy’ which is when an egg is fertilized but does not implant in the uterus so the pregnancy does not continue. that positive test was not faulty or false, it was just an early test.

if you think you might be pregnant, get your hands on a test. you don’t need the fancy digital ones. the ones you can buy at places like the dollar tree work just as well. buy a few and take one every day until your period comes on if you need to. if there is a FAINT line you aren’t sure about (sometimes tests have something called an indent that makes a shadow that can be mistaken as a very very faint line), test again the next day. as a general rule, morning is the best time to test for most people.

in a post-roe america, is it vitally necessary that you know and understand that because if you intend to terminate, your window is incredibly small in most states and by the time you’ve missed a period or begun to suspect you might be pregnant, there’s a decent chance you are past the cutoff. please please please educate yourselves on this because it could mean the difference between you having access to the healthcare that you need.

can someone please be proud of me like fuck I’m trying

reblog to let prev know you’re proud of them

She just fuckin rolled it up

"Don't vote to teach the Democrats a lesson!" Great thanks my Jewish disabled queer ass will just die then

This right here. Like ok yes I am an anarchist but what that tells you is a lot about how I would like things to be organized ideally. Unfortunately we don't live in that world.

Meanwhile here in the real world I had to pick up move 2600 miles with 21 sheep and goats, 3 cats, and a dog because the North Carolina GOP pulled off some Manchurian Candidate shit and nowhere in the south was safe for my transgender ass. I left everyone and everything I knew. I left all my family, living and dead.

And now people are like "Biden needs to earn my vote" and sure I get it but also if Trump gets reelected the entire country is going to become the worst southern state in terms of civil rights for anyone who is not a white, abled, cis het dude and I am so tired.

important part of the interview actually

My takeaway was that not only did the adults not know what they were doing, THEY LEFT HER TO TAKE THE BLAME FOR THE WHOLE DEBACLE.

Some updates from the past twelve-ish months:

-- Late 2022: Portland and its mayor (Wheeler) started a major push to ban "street camping". Headlines in major media outlets also described "Portland's first sanctioned mass homeless camp" and how "Portland moves forward with $27 million plan to build mass shelters". In December 2022, Portland-area authorities used the so-called "aggressive landscaping" tactic, installing hundreds of hostile architecture boulders to prevent sitting/sleeping. Also in December, homeless advocates and Disability Rights Washington advocates attempted to halt Spokane's (Washington) clearing of a major camp for hundreds of people, and a federal judge sided with advocates to put a temporary restraining order on the sweep.

-- January 2023: Even in the immediate aftermath of historic cold as far south as Miami and Monterrey, sub-freezing temperatures across the Deep South, and sub-zero-Fahrenheit blizzards sweeping North America for a week or longer around Solstice/Christmas 2022, convenience stores "in Texas, California, New York use classical music to shoo homeless".

-- By March 2023: "Portland Mayor Wheeler unveils first location for city-run homeless camp".

-- April 2023: San Francisco and Mayor Brand announce a major "five-year plan" costing over 600 million dollars "to cut the number of unsheltered homeless in half". (Not a plan to put people in homes or find stable housing, but just to technically put them under the roof of shelter, keeping them out of sight, therefore qualifying them for the strange designation of "the sheltered homeless".) At the same time, San Francisco opened a "long-term homeless shelter on Treasure Island", pushing homeless people onto an isolated island mostly composed of concrete and asphalt.

-- Summer 2023: In May, the city of Phoenix (Arizona) began its project to clear and eliminate its largest homeless camp, known as the Zone, a refuge for hundreds of people. During the record-breaking heat of the summer of 2023, Phoenix cleared the camp systematically, block by block. At the beginning of September 2023, as "Phoenix breaks heat record as city hits 110F [110 degrees Fahrenheit] for the 54th consecutive day", the city cleared the block of the camp where most seniors and the elderly lived.

-- January 2024: About one week ahead of winter holidays (Solstice/Christmas), the City of Edmonton pursued plans to sweep 130 homeless encampments as part of what has been described as a "shocking" eviction plan. In January, the city was clearing camps amidst sustained deadly severe weather, during a polar vortex event with temperatures of negative 50 degrees Fahrenheit and daytime highs of negative 25F. When a court case presented by Coalition for Justice and Human Rights tried to slow the sweeps, a judge sided with them and shut down the evictions.

-- March 2024: Florida's governor signs a new law. NPR describes: "law that seeks to move unhoused people off public property altogether and into government-run encampments".

-- April 2024: The U.S. Supreme Court begins hearing a case from Grants Pass (Oregon) with major implications and potential to incite nationwide "banishment race" and "homelessness crackdown". Lower courts have previously said that city policies (like Grants Pass, Boise, and others) were "cruel and unusual" for fining and/or jailing people for sleeping on public land if no adequate accessible shelter is available. But now?

guess what

this changed my life

I spent 10 minutes mentally preparing myself for this video and I still wasn’t ready.

Sound up!

Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny photographed by David LaChapelle, 1997

English added by me :)

I know I've been posting more about politics lately, and it's caused me to lose a chunk of followers.

But I'm a queer person with a degree in political science and its an election year. I'm old friends with several of my city council members. I've been to trainings on how to run elections. I spent my college years working for nonprofits (and being the world's worst canvasser). I'm close with more than one person who works for unions, and I have family members who work for government agencies.

I think about politics in a very pragmatic "I know how the sausage is made" kind of way. We're in a vice press, and there's only one way to release the pressure.

The revolution ain't coming. There is no one to save us but us.

So yeah, I'm going to be pissed if your answer is "let them tighten the vice -- there's no way out of the vice, it doesn't matter if they loosen or tighten it."

There's a difference, and anyone telling you otherwise is likely a psyop or someone who fell for a psyop. This literally happened before, and it's happening again.

Stop falling for it.

I really don't know who to vote for

You have two choices. And they aren't even close to each other.

(and Line 12 is misleading -- because Trump has literally stated he would like to help Israel "finish the job," while Biden is the only President of my lifetime to threaten withholding aid to Israel)

There is no third choice in American politics. You vote for the candidate who will do the least harm/most good, and you remember that it's not the end of your activism.

its miserable having online friends i would help you clean and paint your room and fold your laundry and move furniture and cook mostly edible food for you and generally do tasks for you and drink with you and smoke with you and go on walks with you and see you smile when i make you laugh. but the distance

all of the USamerican people going "bbut if i vote in the election, im culpable for the unjustifiable evils of the american imperial machine!" just love to paint people who realize that you still need to vote as like, too naïve to understand their oh-so-principled moral stand, when the reality is that if you live in america and you're of voting age and you're realizing for the first time just now that you live in an evil country that runs on the blood of millions and always has, and if you somehow think that you can live here and work here and earn & spend money here and somehow none of that makes you culpable for the horrors that are done on your behalf, but voting does, or would, then you are so stunningly naïve that you need to shut the whole fuck up.

like. yes, the united states is a machine that turns colonial vampirism and for-profit genocides into capital, thanks for noticing, and welcome to the conversation. the rest of us have already figured out that 1. this centuries-old machine that kills people is not gonna just go away, or collapse spectacularly all at once, it is gonna need to be dismantled, and 2. it is not gonna be dismantled by november, and 3. i don't fucking know who told you that if enough people don't vote, nobody becomes president, but that isn't fucking true.

somebody is gonna be the president, and the president is gonna keep doing war crimes like the president always has because that's the president's job, and it will remain that way until we break the whole machine down. now who would you rather be in charge of it while we're trying to break it down: a senile old man who thinks he still needs to behave in ways that are decorous and won't cause bad press, or an angry old man who thinks cops should be able to shoot protesters with live ammo?

you are being offered the chance to pick your opponent in the biggest hardest fight of all time, and you're bitching that you don't wanna because it would make you feel icky to act in a way that is strategic instead of emotional & performative. if you actually cared about the vulnerable people you claim you're doing this for, you'd be willing to suffer a moral injury to keep the evil destructive monster you live inside of from going extra-berserk mode, but no, you want to posture about how you can't taint yourself by "participating" in a process that you are already part of every single day. let us know when you're ready to join us at the grown-ups' table, shitheads. do not @ me idfc