ComradeKingfisher [he/him]

A study published in 2017 in the BMJ found that 3% of people hit by rubber bullets died of the injury. Fifteen percent of the 1,984 people studied were permanently injured by the rubber bullets, also known as “kinetic impact projectiles.”

Rubber bullets should be used only to control “an extremely dangerous crowd,” said Brian Higgins, the former police chief of Bergen County, New Jersey.

“Shooting them into open crowds is reckless and dangerous,” said Dr. Douglas Lazzaro, a professor and expert in eye trauma at NYU Langone Health.

In the past week, a grandmother in La Mesa, California, was hospitalized in an intensive care unit after being hit between the eyes with a rubber bullet. Actor Kendrick Sampson said he was hit by rubber bullets seven times at a Los Angeles protest.

Freelance photographer Linda Tirado said she was blinded by a rubber bullet at a protest in Minneapolis.

In an email, Minneapolis Police Department spokesperson John Elder said, “We use 40 mm less-lethal foam marking rounds. We do not use rubber bullets.”

Elder didn’t mention the brand name of the foam marking rounds used by Minneapolis police. But a website for the “Direct Impact 40 mm OC Crushable Foam Round” depicts a green, bullet-shaped product described as a “point-of-aim, point-of-impact direct-fire round.” The site says the projectiles are “an excellent solution whether you need to incapacitate a single subject or control a crowd.”

No one knows how often police use rubber bullets, or how many people are harmed every year, said Dr. Rohini Haar, a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health and medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights. Many victims don’t go to the hospital.

Police are not required to document their use of rubber bullets, so there is no national data to show how often they’re used, said Higgins, now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. There are no nationally agreed-upon standards for their use.

When aimed at the legs, rubber bullets can stop a dangerous person or crowd from getting closer to a police officer, Lazzaro said.

But when fired at close range, rubber bullets can penetrate the skin, break bones, fracture the skull and explode the eyeball, he said. Rubber bullets can cause traumatic brain injuries and “serious abdominal injury, including injuries to the spleen and bowel along with major blood vessels,” said Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician in New York City and a spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Firing rubber bullets from a distance decreases both their force and their accuracy, increasing the risk of shooting people in the face or hitting bystanders, Lazzaro said.

Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group based in New York, has called for rubber bullets to be banned.

The British military developed rubber bullets 50 years ago to control nationalist rioters in Northern Ireland, although the United Kingdom stopped using them decades ago. Rubber bullets are used by Israeli security forces against Palestinian demonstrators. French police were criticized for using rubber bullets last year after dozens of “yellow jacket” demonstrators were blinded and hundreds were injured.

“Rubber bullets are used almost every day somewhere in the world,” Haar said. “Using them against unarmed civilians is a huge violation of human rights.”

Evo psych is bs and smarter people than I have discussed at length why that is. This pattern of behavior though is def something I’ve experienced and observed throughout my life, especially as the majority of my hobbies and workplaces have always been male dominated. What fucked me up the most tho was the form this behavior took in the .mil. It’s notable bc the .mil has an extreme and explicit form of institutionally enforced hierarchy so the behaviors are particularly toxic and unsubtle and vile.

I refrain from going into how race and class and sexuality etc affected the dynamics not because I didn’t see or experience it, but because I don’t want to write ten thousand words rn. I might type it out and clean it up and post it here at some point bc it’s been rattling around in my head for years and I need to process it. Until then, assume everyone involved is a wh*te cishet enlisted soldier from families of similar income levels.

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The acceptance from high skill males was conditioned on demonstrated competence. There’s always an initial distrust from the misogyny ofc, but the second I or any girl proved we could hang (i.e. be good at the job and perform at least some aspect of masculinity), the most skilled and professional guys took us under their wing and kept other boys from fucking with us.*

Skilled males treated the unskilled women slightly worse than they treated similarly unskilled men. Unskilled males treated unskilled women with more contempt than they treated other unskilled men, and the skilled women on par with the below average men.

If a woman met or exceeded the current cultural beauty standard (and thus performed too much femininity to be taken seriously by brains riddled with patriarchal brainworms), she was taken less seriously by both groups than plain janes and uggos—I counted myself among the latter and it was repeatedly made clear to me that my assessment was correct—that were at similar competence levels. If she was skilled she was taken slightly less seriously than the skilled plains/uggos. If unskilled she was take much, much less seriously.

Regardless of competence the attractive women had more success at the social aspect of the job and thus had slightly more opportunities given to them by less skilled males that had a high enough rank to grant them favors they hoped would result in them getting their dick wet. They often succeeded because they mostly targeted low ranking women who couldn’t really say no because of the implication.

High rank unskilled males treated the unskilled plain/uggo women with disdain but more or less ignored them like they ignored low ranked unskilled men. With skilled plain/uggo women they had active contempt for them and went out of the way to fuck with them. If a skilled plain/uggo woman didn’t have the protection of a high rank skilled man of equal or higher rank to the high rank unskilled man, skilled plain/uggo women were in for an especially miserable time.

Now that I pass as a cis guy and am stealth irl, I feel an immense relief that I’m no longer subjected to the treatment women get.

I’m still a militant feminist and revel in using cis male status to advocate for women and shut misogynistic behavior down, but like yeah, not being treated with automatic contempt because of my gender is so freeing. It’s a similar reduction in the background stress I got from getting top surgery, and I sincerely cannot emphasize enough how freeing top surgery was.

Tbh it feels silly to say but I think I’ve got a sort of survivor’s guilt from it. Because of the dysphoria rather than the hardship of being perceived as a women there’s no way in hell I would ever go back, but I do feel like I abandoned the homies.**

*when I was in there was a soldier shortage and almost every unit was understaffed, so idk how much of this “acceptance” was driven by the necessity of needing every able body they could get to do the job. I’m curious to know if the pattern holds when they’ve enough skilled males. I’d also be interesting in knowing how each job and each branch’s culture influences the pattern.

**Until I was able to articulate this to myself, I respected but didn’t really fully understand why some binary trans men that identified strongly as a butch lesbian or even non butch lesbian prior to realization/transitioning continued do so after transitioning. Like there’s a whole culture to being a woman, a stronger culture to being a lesbian, and an even stronger culture to being a butch lesbian–culture and community is such an essential part of our lives that dropping them is like chopping off a favored limb, and no one should be obligated to chop off a limb.

Consider the following case:

Alice and her dog: Alice self-describes as being in a romantic relationship with her dog. She cares a lot about his wellbeing and strives to ensure that his needs are fulfilled. They often sleep together; he likes to be caressed and she finds it pleasant to gently rub herself on him. Sometimes, when her dog is sexually aroused and tries to hump her leg, she undresses and lets him penetrate her vagina. This is gratifying for both of them.

Alice’s story describes a kind of relationship commonly described within the Zeta movement, where there is a reciprocal emotional attachment between the human and the animal and sexual contacts are sexually gratifying to both of them. It is tempting to think that Alice’s relationship illustrates one way in which humans can develop more equal and non-exploitative relationships with animals, that go beyond our negative duties not to harm them.

What Alice’s story also illustrates is that there is a continuity between zoophilia and affectionate relationships that ordinary people have with their pets. What is it that makes affectionately caressing one’s cat of a different ethical standing than sexually caressing one’s cat? If there is no clear-cut boundary between the ordinary love that pet keepers express and the romantic love that some zoophiles express, then why accept one and not the other?