Jace

it’s cute dancing robots! they have a cute robot dog! it’s cute! it’s friendly!

well, the robot dog friend? cute little jumpy guy, does some careful ballet-esque steps, often between the humanoid robots? so far, both the boston police and the nypd (heads up: autoplaying video, with sound) have ‘deployed’ the cute dog friend. both departments say that the robots are being used as ‘observation devices’, sent into buildings with lights and a camera that sends a videofeed back to the cops. 

part of why i think this video (and others like it) is so interesting is because boston dynamics has defended police use of the robots, saying that there’s a clause that the robots can’t be used in a way that would ‘physically harm or intimidate people’. i don’t know about you, but if i were at, say, a protest, or honestly literally anywhere, and a robot dog started running towards me, i’d be pretty fucking intimidated. i’d assume that it was going to hurt me. if one of the humanoid robots were running towards me, i’d assume it was straight-up about to kill me. 

but these videos do a lot of work to erode that assumption. how can anyone claim that they’re intimidated by, say, a line of robot dogs at a protest? the robot dogs do funny dances online! the video above has been live for about two months, and it has thirty million views. people love them! they can dance!

so when they start being used as mobile security cameras, or when they start being used to maintain a perimeter or for crowd control or whatever, it’s not really a violation of the contract. the robots are friendly! my bet is that when they start setting them out to do security or whatever—and i don’t doubt that they’ll be used for security, etc—they might even do funny little dances and interact with people who stop to gawk at them. anything to normalize increasingly autonomous roboticized policing. get one of the humanoid ones out in the field, and it’s a remarkably short step to autonomous, mobile cctv—that can also detain you if it doesn’t like what you’re doing, or if there was a crime and you’re in the area, or if your face looks like someone from a database, or—

and all that assumes, of course, that the no-harm clause stays there forever, and that police departments, so famous for their love of doing things by the book, adhere to it. but just for fun, watch that video again, and imagine even one of those robots weaponized, outfitted with even ‘nonlethal’ crowd control. 

foam bullets are solid metal and foam-tipped, bean-bag rounds are sacks of cloth filled with lead pellets and rubber bullets are metal bullets that have rubber-coating - it’s a deliberate trick of language to make writing and reporting about it diminish the violence they cause the victims. 

“police fired bean bag rounds and foam bullets at protestors” sounds like the cops are using kindergarden weapons and not shooting to kill. 

My dear lgbt+ kids, 

April 7th is Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Rememberance Day). 

Every year, I light a candle to remember a victim of the Holocaust. 

If you’d like to, you can join me virtually on illuminatethepast.org. Their goal is “ six million people lighting six million candles to remember each soul lost in the Holocaust”. 

You will receive the name of one person and can light a virtual candle for them. Aditionally, you can write a personal message or learn more about them and their life.

With all my love, 

Cold day

and one method (though not entirely foolproof) to figuring that out is asking “would I be upset if another girl was treated like this?”

like, I’d be just as mad if some dude said “you can’t do math because you’re a girl” to a female classmate as I would if he said it to me

however, I never got uncomfortable at waiters calling my female friends “m'am”, I was only uncomfortable when they called *me* that