Protocols for Common Injuries from Police Weapons—for street medics and medical professionals treating demonstrators
https:/:cwc.im/TreatingPoliceViolence
This is drawn from our experience in years of struggle at the #ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France. It is not an introductory guide. If you are interested in learning about how to be a street medic, we have included some introductory resources at the beginning.
These guidelines are intended to equip street medics and health professionals to respond to some of the common injuries inflicted by police violence. They emerged from our experience in a struggle against an airport that the French government tried—and failed—to build in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. It can be difficult to find solid information about how to treat such injuries based on real-life experience. Most mainstream health professionals have little experience treating injuries caused by police weapons; this guide shares the knowledge we gained in repeatedly treating these injuries, in hopes of saving others the trouble of having to learn by trial and error.
why didn’t i realize the name of lou’s cloudward ho character is a direct reference to uncle monty from asoue book 2 until brennan said “i think we all know deep down an uncle and a doctor and a professor are all the same” months later in an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT SEASON that lou is not even playing in!!!!
Be careful not to buy a Chinese toaster! It may be SPYING ON YOUR TOASTING HABITS and sharing your valuable tada (toast data) with the Chinese government!!!
This post has been sponsored by Door Snitch! It's a camera you put on your door that snitches on you (to the local cops that can kidnap you)!
In 1776, Thomas Jefferson, as author of the Declaration of Independence, accused the king of England of having "excited domestic insurrections amongst us," with reference to the slave revolts occasionally supported by England insofar as they weakened US bourgeois power.
In 1807, Thomas Jefferson, as president of the US, signed into law the Insurrection Act, "authorizing the employment of the land and naval forces of the United States, in cases of insurrections."
In 1831, president Andrew Jackson invoked the Insurrection Act to repress the slave revolt led by Nat Turner.
Although liberal historians like to point to the times when the Act was invoked to defend Black reconstruction in the 1870s, and to enforce the desegregation in the 1960s, the majority of invocations have been used to repress slave revolts, ghetto uprisings, and militant labor strikes.
In 1992, the most recent invocation of the Act occurred when president Bush Sr. used it to repress uprisings following Rodney King's murder.
This is the law which Trump is threatening Minneapolis with. A law theorized and established by slaveholders anxious to defend their "property," employed by white-supremacist bourgeois pigs in order to keep down the wretched of the earth.
When we say that the racist violence going on today is fundamental to the existence of the US, this is what we mean. Not simply in a metaphorical or spiritual sense, but in an explicitly traceable one, the violence enacted under Trump is the founding father's system working as intended.
The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating ungovernability as a habit
I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER TONIGHT (Jan 22) at The Tattered Cover, and in COLORADO SPRINGS THIS WEEKEND (Jan 23–25) where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on WEDS (Jan 28) at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
I am on record as being skeptical of the notion that if you shop very carefully, you can make society better. "Conscious consumption" is not a tool for structural change, and any election that requires you to "vote with your wallet" is always won by the people with the thickest wallets (statistically speaking, that's not you):
Now, that's not to say that boycotts are useless. But a boycott is a structured and organized campaign. The Montgomery bus boycott wasn't a matter of a bunch of people waking up one morning and saying, "You know what, fuck it, I'm gonna walk today":
The Montgomery bus boycott was an organized project, put together by a powerful membership organization, the NAACP, that demanded far more of its members than merely shopping very carefully. The boycott was the end stage of an organized resistance, not a substitute for it.
The problem with "conscious consumption" is that it comes out of the neoliberal tradition in which every political matter is supposedly determined by your individual actions, and not your actions as part of a union or other political institution that works as a bloc to overthrow the status quo.
"Conscious consumption" arises out of the tradition that gave us Margaret Thatcher's maxim, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
Any attempt to change society by shopping very carefully is destined to fail, but it's worse than that. Because "shopping very carefully" never makes systemic change, its practitioners inevitably decide the reason they're not seeing the change they yearn for is that their allies aren't shopping carefully enough. This turns the careful shopper into a cop who polices other people's consumption, demanding that they stop eating some foodstuff or using Twitter or watching HBO Max. Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis.
Which is not an argument against boycotts! Boycotts work. If boycotts didn't work, then genocide apologists wouldn't be apoplectic over the BDS movement:
https://bdsmovement.net/
But a "boycott" isn't the same thing as "you and your social circle deciding that buying the wrong product makes you a Bad Person and then devoting your energies to scolding your allies for choosing Coke instead of Pepsi." Boycotts are downstream of organizing; they are not a substitute for organizing. There is such a thing as society.
Now, all that said, I will confess: I sometimes do something that looks a lot like "shopping very carefully," and when I do, I derive enormous satisfaction from it (but I am always careful not to mistake my tiny victories for political action). But I get it, honestly, I do. Sometimes, "shopping very carefully" is a way to eke out a tiny, personal victory in the face of overwhelming odds against a wildly overmatched opponent. That feels very good.
One example would be patronizing my local repair shop (or fixing my stuff myself). The big structural barriers to repair are things like "parts pairing":
The repair problem isn't that your neighbors are "sheeple" who've had their minds warped by a "throwaway society." The problem is that technical and legal countermeasures have made repair so hard and unprofitable that getting your stuff fixed is more expensive and time-consuming than it needs to be.
That said: I love going to my local repair shop. I love fixing things on my own. It's great. It makes me feel great. I think you should do it because it may make you feel great, too, and it'd be nice for you to support your local fix-it place, but let's not pretend that we'll change society that way.
Here's another example: for the past couple years, I've been navigating a (thankfully very treatable) cancer diagnosis. The fact that my cancer is very treatable doesn't mean it's easily treated. America's shitty, for-profit healthcare system is terrible at the best of times, and nearly unnavigable when coping with a complex condition that crosses a lot of disciplinary lines and requires access to specialized, expensive equipment.
I'm asymptomatic, so the hardest part of having cancer – so far – is fighting the Kaiser bureaucracy to make sure my treatment goes off as planned:
The fact that the different Kaiser departments drop so many balls when handing off care between them means that I have to juggle those balls for them. I make extensive use of organizational tactics like "suspense files," which are a kind of inverted to-do list, in that they let you manage other people's to-do lists, rather than your own:
(In case you're wondering, the best part of having cancer is that Kaiser comps 100% of your parking! Free cancer parking!)
Now, I also make sure to note each of Kaiser's failures and I raise grievances and California health ombudsman complaints for each one – not because I'm angry and want an apology, but because I'm a well-organized, native English-speaking cancer patient with no symptoms, which means that I can do the advocacy that other people can't, and help them (I also track these complaints with suspense files, calendar entries, etc, to make sure that they're followed through).
Partly, I'm able to do this because I'm very organized. I'm not organized because I worship at the cult of "personal productivity"; I'm definitely Jenny Odell-pilled on that score:
I'm organized because I pursue The Way of Jim Munroe's "Time Management for Anarchists" ("once I learned how to make my own structure, I was able to kick my expensive boss habit and work on my own"):
Having invested a lot of energy into being organized, I now get massive discounts on dealing with other people's shit. Remember: giant corporations and other remorseless bureaucracies throw up roadblocks on the assumption that you will be a "rational economic actor." The airline assumes that if it costs you 15 hours to collect on the $50 voucher you're entitled to, you will just let them steal $50 from you. But once you get organized enough, you can cut that 15-hour investment down to a 15-minute one, and I will absolutely trade 15 minutes of dealing with an airline's bullshit for $50 of that airline's money.
(Why yes, Air Canada did fuck me over on Jan 3 and get me home at 5AM the next day, instead of 730PM the night before; and yes, they did deny my compensation claim; and yes, I have filed an appeal with the Canada Transport Agency; why do you ask?)
One of my favorite podcasts is "An Arm and a Leg," which divides itself between deep dive structural analyses into how corrupt and ghastly American medical billing is, and enumerations of sweet hacks that ninja bill-fighters have come up with to slice through the billing labyrinth your insurer and hospital trap you in and cut straight to the bullseye:
https://armandalegshow.com/
For example, the latest episode tells the story of med student Thomas Sanford, who figured out that hospitals were stealing billions of dollars every year from the poorest people in America, who were all entitled to have their medical bill canceled. He founded Dollarfor, a nonprofit that helps patients get their medical debt canceled:
Dollarfor now has an automated tool that guides you through a survey and then generates and files the completed, hospital-specific paperwork needed to get your medical debt canceled (they've made versions of this for every hospital in America!):
https://dollarfor.org/
(If you're a health worker, here's a printable guide with QR codes that you can clip to your lanyard and show to patients while you deliver care):
Now, the real problem here isn't that hospitals steal billions from charity cases: it's that America has a garbage for-profit healthcare system that kills and bankrupts people at scale. Dollarfor is amazing, but it's not going to fix that problem. I don't know Sanford, but I bet if you asked him, he'd agree with this, and say something like, "Yes, and I'm helping people not have their lives destroyed by this garbage system, which is good unto itself; and also, it might give them the free time and wherewithal to participate in movements to overthrow the garbage system."
I really dote on the fact that Dollarfor has literally built a different version of their tool for every single hospital in the country. It's a perfect example of how turning yourself into a highly organized adversary can overcome the time-based economics our enemies rely on to keep their garbage systems intact.
Whenever I think of this stuff, I flash on two pop-culture references that made a deep impression on me. The first comes from 1985's Real Genius, Val Kilmer's best ever movie (fight me!). Real Genius is set at a fictionalized version of Caltech in which young prodigies slowly discover that their scumbag prof has tricked them into working on a weapons contract for the DoD.
This being fictional-Caltech, there are all these scenes in which very smart people do weird and amazing things. At one point, we learn that there's a former child prodigy living in the basement under the dorms, a guy named Lazlo Hollyfeld who became a hermit after discovering that he, too, had been duped into working on a baby-killer project. We get these tantalizing glimpses of Lazlo in his subterranean redoubt, where he has built some kind of giant Rube Goldberg machine that is engaged in a mysterious mechanical process that involves manipulating cards of some sort.
At the film's denouement (spoiler alert for a 40 year old movie), we discover what he was doing:
Lazlo: These are entries into the Frito-Lay Sweepstakes. "No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want" – so I am.
Chris: That's great! How many times?
Lazlo: Well, this batch makes it one million six hundred and fifty thousand. I should win thirty-two point six percent of the prizes, including the car.
Chris: That kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn't it?
Lazlo: They set up the rules, and lately I've come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kBfBXZBdc
Then there's a scene from the otherwise tepid (fight me!) Batman Returns (1992) in which we encounter the Penguin in his subterranean redoubt, brandishing pages full of kompromat that have been laboriously taped together:
The Penguin: What about the documents that prove you own half the firetraps in Gotham City?
Maximillian 'Max' Shreck: If there were such documents – and that's not an admission – I would have seen to it they were shredded.
The Penguin: Ah, good idea! [pulls out a sheaf of documents]
The Penguin: A lot of tape and a little patience make all the difference.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103776/quotes/
Both Lazlo and the Penguin are defeating the time-based security assumptions of their adversaries. Frito Lay treats filling in 1.65m sweepstakes entries as the same thing as filling in infinity entries; Max Schrek treats the time needed to piece together shredded paper as infinite. Rounding a very large number up to infinity isn't entirely irrational, but once you get organized enough, you just might be able to find the time – or a system – to bring that very big number down to an entirely tractable value.
Yes, this is a species of "careful shopping" but my point isn't to say that shopping carefully is useless – rather, that it's a drastic error to mistake this useful (and surprisingly satisfying) tactic for a strategy that will truly alter the system.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Dollarfor now has an automated tool that guides you through a survey and then generates and files the completed, hospital-specific paperwork needed to get your medical debt canceled (they've made versions of this for every hospital in America!):
You may not have to pay that bill. Most hospitals offer bill forgiveness based on income. We help you apply for debt relief — for free.
The trained big government zombies all chortling and rolling their eyes at nazi comparisons evidently didn't listen to a single history lesson or they went to a school with only those abridged texas history books, because the nazi movement and in fact every tyrannical empire of the modern world went precisely through the stage of "cracking down on illegal citizens" under exactly the same excuses of "keeping our own people safe" and "just enforcing our laws."
And there's NO case in which a country did this that *wasn't* tyrannical. There is no instance, anywhere in our history, in any nation, of a government hunting people down on its own soil for paperwork infractions that actually solved or even slightly improved any problem it was claimed to address.
This is not hyperbole. An "illegal alien crackdown" has never had benefits worth even just the money it cost, not ever not once, let alone the fact that such a course of action has never not ever not once managed to only persecute "bad people." I'm not even talking about the margin of error or inevitability that "some" innocent people get "mistakenly" arrested, I mean this type of movement has destroyed more good people than violent people EVERY time, always, invariably.
It has never been done and can't be done. There has never been a benevolent, beneficial justifiable example of a nation's leaders trying to cull the population based on "legal citizenry." Every government that claims to have done it and seen improvements to crime rate or the economy is just plainly lying about that, and it's stupidly easy to just check. Like it's not even an actually good lie or even a propaganda campaign, they just ruin a bunch of lives and say it was good and that's it. They get away with it because their supporters don't care if there's a good reason or a payoff anyway, they just wanted to see fewer "foreigners" at the supermarket. That is the benefit in their eyes and any other repercussions are worth it to them.
isn't it insane though how schizophrenic people are viewed as violent and dangerous by the majority of society when in reality schizophrenic people are nearly 14 times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than to be the perpetrators...
1) schizophrenia hardly ever causes people to be violent so schizophrenic people aren’t more likely to be violent than anyone else
2) schizophrenic people’s autonomy is often taken away from them because of their schizophrenia. because the authorities and mental healthcare providers often automatically assume schizophrenic people to be violent, they’re more likely to immediately react to schizophrenic people's symptoms with violence, without even knowing for sure said schizophrenic person was going to be violent. all of this causes schizophrenic people to be more likely of being victims of violence and abuse. schizophrenic people also have a harder time getting out of abusive households because of the risk of their autonomy being taken away. if a schizophrenic person’s relative or partner is abusive, often the schizophrenic person has no way out of the situation, both because our disconnect from reality can result in us being easier to manipulate, and because the system is built in a way that it takes away our autonomy because of our condition.
also schizophrenic people and psychotic people in general, please do a lot of research before picking a provider for your own sake, and if they try to treat your psychosis in a way that you think is harmful then don’t hesitate to switch providers. your safety and wellbeing should be a priority over everything else.
Finally, an open hardware printer you can actually understand, repair, and upgrade
Open Printer is an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair. You can print on standard sheets or paper rolls and choose between black or color cartridges, refillable at your convenience.
This project aims to reclaim our everyday tools. As such, it features no proprietary drivers, no cartridge DRM that locks you to a single vendor and is designed to never become obsolete. The Open Printer is built for longevity and customizability, ensuring that it remains fully under your control.
I hope every one in the notes excited about this printer goes to the link and signs up to receive updates so the people making it can actually see the amount of interest this project has.
When texting my friend Ahmed, I offered to translate my words into Arabic using tools available to me.
He assured me multiple times that he would translate, telling me "I understand some words in English. I was diligent in it at school and I do translation too."
I am always extremely humbled by his gift of making our conversations easier for me. Learning multiple languages is challenging, and it's something I've struggled with despite being so much older than him and receiving so many advantages he's never had.
Even if he had not told me of his diligence in his studies, I would have known. He is such a bright, thoughtful young person.
Ahmed's passion for education is enduring. As he wrote in his fundraiser, the hope he holds onto through everything is to rebuild his life, continue his education, and develop his skills.
Ahmed is #198 on the @gazavetters list. His family's home was destroyed in a bombing, and more recently even their tent was damaged substantially. They have struggled to raise enough money to afford repairs.
His family has endured terrible famine. Donations were sustaining some recovery from malnutrition for a little while, but the previous deletion of his GoFundMe set him very far back and Israel is blocking aid from entering Gaza again. He told me today that his family has not eaten any bread in four days.
Even more urgent, his family does not have access to clean drinking water. He told me, "we need medication as soon as possible because we are suffering from severe stomach pain due to the cloudy water we are drinking."
My name is Ahmad Dany. I am writing to you from the heart of the daily suffering we … Ahmad dany needs your support for Help Ahmed And His F
Ahmed (@ahmedaldaniii) eventually needs to raise funds for dental healthcare.
Israeli attacks exposed his mother to toxic gasses while she was pregnant with Ahmed, and he was born with a disability that impacts the growth of his teeth.
He now needs dental implants, but cannot receive this in Gaza because so much infrastructure has been destroyed. He needs to raise money for both the healthcare itself and the fees to travel out of Gaza to a doctor who can adequately provide the care he needs.
But first he needs potable drinking water and enough calories to make it through the month.
We need your help, guys. Our bodies can't take this pain anymore. We're starving because we don't have any food, because food is so expensive, and because we haven't eaten bread in a long time. We also have terrible stomach pains because we're drinking contaminated water. Please help us before it's too late so we can buy food and get out of here.
Please help Ahmed's family to get potable water, food, and medicine.
I know money is tight for so many of us right now, but every donation makes a real difference.
If you have any kind of consistent income but can't afford to donate a couple dollars or euros now, I ask you to please reblog once now and to schedule another reblog for whenever you get your next paycheck <3
Please, friends, help us. Prices are still very high because of the border closures. No food is getting in, we can't leave Gaza, and even medicine isn't reaching us because of the closures. My injured brother's pain is increasing because he can't get medicine or healthy food, and he can't leave Gaza to receive surgery. Please, friends, help us by donating and don't abandon us.🥺
Please, friends, help us! Food prices are still extremely high, and we can't afford healthy food. We're only eating legumes, which weaken our bodies, and we can't get through the day without feeling hungry. Please, friends, help us by donating. We've only received three donations today. Please help us by donating and don't leave us.🥺❤️🩹
Whoever talked Murph into wearing a figure skating rainbow beaded top with JNCOs, I need to thank you personally. I'm unwell and will never recover, but thank you
fan of wizards @emage-search - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
