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[antifainternational]

you antifa guys are actually more hateful and violent than any neo nazi group in the 21st century. its fucking disgusting and you should be branded as terrorists just as much as the KKK

We’d usually just block you, Anon, but we’re going to use your message as a reminder of where the violence is coming from in 2017.  Off the top of our heads, here’s what the year has looked like so far:January 20, 2017: A right-wing extremist shoots a protestor at a Milo Yiannopoulos event at the University of Washington. January 29, 2017: Alexandre Bissonnette walks into a mosque in Canada during evening prayers and opens fire, shooting 17 people and killing six of them.

January 2017: Over 40 Jewish centers in the U.S. receive bomb threats. February 22, 2017: Adam Purinton tells two men from India to “get out of my country” then shoots both plus a bystander, killing one.February 28, 2017: a mosque in Toronto is set on fire by arsonists.March 12, 2017: a mosque in Ypsilanti, MI. is set on fire by arsonists.March 20, 2017: James Jackson arrives in Manhattan with a sword and stabs the first black man he sees to death.  He later tells authorities he “intended to kill as many black men as he could.”March 24, 2017: Yelling “I hate Muslims!” a man in Minneapolis stabbed a Somali man in an attempt to kill him.  March 26, 2017: A racist mob attacks a 15-year-old Polish boy in Gloucestershire and, when a local Asian shopkeeper tries to intervene, attack him as well with crowbars and baseball bats, then attempt to run him over with a car.March 31, 2017: A 17-year-old Iranian/Kurdish boy is nearly beaten to death by a mob of eight people in Croydon after he revealed to them that he was a refugee.April 6, 2017: A Charlotte store is set on fire by an arsonist who leaves a warning message for the shop owner that he “did not want any refugee business owners and that they would torture the owner if they did not leave and go back to where they came from,” according to police.  It was signed “White America.”MAY 5TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:

April 30, 2017: A  white man storms a pool party in San Diego and shoots four black women, two black men, and one Latino man while allowing white attendees to leave.  One victim dies while the other six sustain critical injuries.

MAY 10TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:May 5, 2017: A man walking his dog on South Beach in Miami is confronted by two men who call him a “fucking faggot,” then attack him, beating him unconscious.  At one point in the attack, one of the attackers shouts “all faggots need to die and we’re going to make sure they do!”MAY 18TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:May 14, 2017: Vandals spray-paint hate graffiti on the home of a black family in upstate New York before attempting to set the house on fire while the family slept.  Although the family escaped unscathed, their garage burnt to the ground and their house suffered some damage.May 17, 2017: A homophobic mob break into the home of a gay couple and shoot and stab both men to death.  MAY 23RD: EDITED TO INCLUDE:May 20, 2017: University of Maryland student and member of the “alt-Reich” facebook group Sean Urbanski walks up to 22-year-old Richard Collins III, who is black and who Urbanski does not know, and stabs him to death in an unprovoked attack. May 27th: EDITED TO INCLUDE:May 24, 2017: A barrage of doxxing, rape threats, and death threats received by trans comic book artist Sophie Labelle forces her to cancel an appearance and event at a Halifax book store, which also received bomb threats and threats of attacking the event.  Labelle is forced into hiding.May 26, 2017: Three men intervene on a MAX train in Portland when they witness another man verbally abusing two Muslim women with an Islamophobic tirade.  The Islamophobe responds by pulling out a knife and stabs the three interveners, killing two of them.  

MAY 30th: EDITED TO INCLUDE:

May 27, 2017: A white man drives his pickup truck through a campsite, targeting the Native Americans camping there while yelling racial slurs at them.  He intentionally drives over two Native American men, killing one and injuring the other.June 3rd: EDITED TO INCLUDE:

March 3, 2017: A Sikh man is shot and injured in front of his Seattle house by a white man waring a mask, who yells at him to “go back to your country!”May 27, 2017: A 34-year-old Anthony Hammond lets loose with a flurry of racial slurs directed at a black man in a parking lot, then pulls out a machete and stabs the man before barricading himself in his apartment for several hours, until finally surrendering to police.

JUNE 13th: EDITED TO INCLUDE:January 1, 2017: 19-year-old Nathan Richardson encounters 67-year-old jogger Wenqing Xu and beats him to death in an unprovoked, random attack.  After committing the murder, Richardson texted his friends that he “fucked sum chink up. Bodied him. I think pure crime scene – his head’s gone,”JUNE 19TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:June 18, 2017: two men armed with baseball bats attack a group of Muslim teenagers, kidnapping a 17-year-old girl, who they beat to death, dumping her body in a pond.

June 1, 2017: A Princeton professor and racialized woman is forced to cancel a three-city lecture tour to promote her book about the Black Lives Matter movement after receiving over 50 death threats.June 19, 2017: Shouting “I’m going to kill all Muslims!” 47-year-old Darren Osborne drives a courier van through a crowd of Muslims leaving a Finsbury mosque, killing one person and injuring ten others.

JULY 4TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:January 28, 2017: a First Nations woman walking with her sister is struck by a trailer hitch hurled from a passing vehicle.  After struggling in hospital for several months, she succumbs to her injuries.  June 21, 2017:  an Islamophobe approaches a Muslim man and woman sitting in a car stopped at a traffic light and knocks on the window.  When the driver rolls down the window, the Islamophobe sprays the driver and passenger with acid, severely burning both.  JULY 16TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:February 21, 2017: a 24-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Chicago, IL. February 26, 2017: a transgender woman is shot and killed in New Orleans, LA.March 1, 2017: a transgender woman is stabbed to death in New Orleans, LA. March 22, 2017: a 38-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Baltimore, MD.April 21, 2017: a 28-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Miami, FL. May 17, 2017: a 34-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Fresno, CA.July 2, 2017:  a 28-year-old transgender woman is shot and killed in Lynchburg, VA. JULY 25TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:

June 3, 2017: 38-year-old white supremacist Phillip Wade racially abuses a 57-year-old black man on an Oakley, CA. bus, then pulls a knife and stabs the man to death while the man is walking away from the confrontation.  The victim is the third racialized person Wade has stabbed in the past six years and the second person he’s murdered.  July 16, 2017: A man attempts to pull the hijab off of a Muslim woman waiting for the tube in London, then hits her when she resists.  He then pins her friend to the wall and spits in her face before leaving.  July 16, 2017: Arsonists set a mosque in Manchester ablaze. July 18, 2017: A NASA researcher of South Asian descent has her car windshield shattered by a rock thrown through it by an assailant screaming “go back to your country!”  She’s injured in the attack.AUGUST 2ND: EDITED TO INCLUDE:July 19, 2017: Two men exit a car and attack a racialized pedestrian with their fists and an iron bar.  AUGUST 7TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:August 5, 2017: A mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota is firebombed, narrowly missing killing & injuring dozens of members there for morning prayers. AUGUST 10TH: EDITED TO INCLUDE:August 8, 2017: A well-known Chicago neo-nazi starts an altercation at a concert, then pulls out a smuggled knife and stabs a man and a woman at the show.AUGUST 12TH: EDITED TO INCLUDED:August 12, 2017:  A white supremacist in Charlottesville, VA. drives his car at high speed directly into a crowd of anti-racist protestors, killing one woman and seriously injured 19 other people.

In case you have trouble counting, Anon, that’s three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve shootings, three four five six arsons, two three four seven eight nine ten eleven stabbings, two three four five mob beatings, over 40 41 bomb threats and an acid attack by bigots, Islamophobes, nazis and racists so far this year.  Eight Nine Eleven Twelve Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen Nineteen Twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six Twenty-seven Twenty-Eight people are dead because of these bigoted attacks and fifteen twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-five thirty-five thirty-seven thirty-nine fifty-eight were severely injured.  But it’s anti-fascists that people should be worried about, right?“you should be branded as terrorists just as much as the KKK“ 

Really, now?  Anti-fascists are as much terrorists as the KKK, a terrorist organization which murdered over 3000 people in lynchings, arsons, bombings, etc. over its 150-year history, are we? 

Maybe it’s time you learned about the logical fallacy of false equivalence, Anon!  

[queeranarchism]

Gentle reminder that Charlottesville is not a case of 

“We told you they’d murder people and now they’ve finally murdered one”

but a case of

“We’ve been screaming at the top of our lungs that they have been and are murdering people on the daily.”

[maxofs2d]

Sorry about this being in Twitter format but it was too good not to share. (x)

[imathers]

Boy, I remember when all of this seemed* like a mostly abstract consideration and not something we’re going to have to take to the streets over and over again to combat.

*(rightly or wrongly [probably the latter], and I am fully aware this also speaks to how privileged my existence is)

[mediamattersforamerica]

Thanks, Obama.

[micdotcom]

Watch: In searing speech, Obama exposes yet another horrifying side of Donald Trump

[vox]

Donald Trump just joked someone should assassinate a Supreme Court Justice or Hillary Clinton

Speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina on Tuesday, Donald Trump made an offhand comment that “Second Amendment people” might have some unspecified way to stop a President Hillary Clinton’s judges from abolishing gun rights.

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment,” Trump said. “By the way, and if she gets to pick — if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

Trump’s remarks are a bit garbled, but they appear to be a joke that gun owners could use their weaponry to prevent the government from rolling back their gun rights.

Yes, this really happened.

[babydreamgirl-deactivated201902]

This was literally today in my town . Disgosteng

[ultralaser]

remember when sarah palin released a list of democratic senators to challenge and literally put target crosshairs on the names after years of glenn beck et al crying that ‘someone’ should do ‘something’ and gabby giffords was on the list and then someone who watched a lot of glenn beck came to a gabby giffords rally and shot her in the head, along with eighteen other people, killing six, and then when they asked sarah palin if she felt responsible she said no

anyways this is that, trump literally advocating for domestic terrorism, just softly enough that his followers can hear him but he can also try to deny it if anything does happen

[satobusiness-deactivated2018030]

– This Was Never Supposed to Happen To You

[fuckyeahdementia]

[robertreich]

Hillary, Bernie, and the Banks

Giant Wall Street banks continue to threaten the wellbeing of millions of Americans, but what to do?

Bernie Sanders says break them up and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated investment from commercial banking.

Hillary Clinton says charge them a bit more and oversee them more carefully.

Most Republicans say don’t worry.

Clearly, there’s reason to worry. Back in 2000, before they almost ruined the economy and had to be bailed out, the five biggest banks on Wall Street held 25 percent of the nation’s banking assets. Now they hold more than 45 percent.

Their huge size fuels further growth because they’ll be bailed out if they get into trouble again.

This hidden federal guarantee against failure is estimated be worth over $80 billion a year to the big banks. In effect, it’s a subsidy from the rest of us to the bankers.

And they’ll almost certainly get into trouble again if nothing dramatic is done to stop them. Consider their behavior since they were bailed out.

In 2012 JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank on Street, lost $6.2 billion betting on credit default swaps tied to corporate debt – and then publicly lied about the losses. It later came out that the bank paid illegal bribes to get the business in the first place.

Last May the Justice Department announced the biggest criminal price-fixing conspiracy in modern history, in which the biggest banks manipulated the $5.3 trillion-a-day currency market in a “brazen display of collusion,” according to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Wall Street is on the road to another crisis. 

This would take a huge toll. Although the banks have repaid the billions we lent them in 2008, many Americans are still living with the collateral damage from what occurred – lost jobs, savings, and homes.

But rather than prevent this by breaking up the big banks and resurrecting Glass-Steagall, Hillary Clinton is taking a more cautious approach.

She wants to impose extra fees on the banks, with the amounts depending not on the bank’s size but how much it depends on short-term funding (such as fast-moving capital markets), which is a way of assessing riskiness.

So a giant bank that relies mainly on bank deposits wouldn’t be charged.

Clinton would also give bank regulators more power than they have under the Dodd-Frank Act (passed in the wake of the last banking crisis) to break up any particular bank that they consider too risky.

And she wants more oversight of so-called “shadow” banks – pools of money (like money market mutual funds, hedge funds, and insurance funds) that act like banks.

All this makes sense. And in a world where the giant Wall Street banks didn’t have huge political power, these measures might be enough.

But, if you hadn’t noticed, Wall Street’s investment bankers, key traders, top executives, and hedge-fund and private-equity managers wield extraordinary power. 

They’re major sources of campaign contributions to both parties.

In addition, a lucrative revolving door connects the Street to Washington. Treasury secretaries and their staffs move nimbly from and to the Street, regardless of who’s in the Oval Office.

Key members of Congress, especially those involved with enacting financial laws or overseeing financial regulators, have fat paychecks waiting for them on Wall Street when they retire.

Which helps explain why no Wall Street executive has been indicted for the fraudulent behavior that led up to the 2008 crash. Or for the criminal price-fixing scheme settled in 2012. Or for other excesses since then.

And why even the fines imposed on the banks have been only a fraction of the banks’ potential gains.

And also why Dodd-Frank has been watered down into vapidity.

For example, it requires major banks to prepare “living wills” describing how they’d unwind their operations if they get into serious trouble.

But no big bank has come up with one that passes muster. Federal investigators have found them all “unrealistic.”

That’s not surprising because if they were realistic, the banks would effectively lose their hidden “too-big-to-fail” subsidies.

Given all this, Hillary Clinton’s proposals would only invite more dilution and finagle.

The only way to contain the Street’s excesses is with reforms so big, bold, and public they can’t be watered down – busting up the biggest banks and resurrecting Glass-Steagall.  

[babyionian-deactivated20200611]

before today, i hadn’t heard of “rough rides,” and there’s a good chance you haven’t either. basically, a “rough ride” is a horrifying process in which ‘a handcuffed man or woman is put into the back of a police van or paddy wagon, without being buckled in or secured. The vehicle then drives recklessly, making sharp, dangerous turns and sudden movements in ways that throw the passenger violently around the vehicle.’

as of today, we now know that this is exactly what happened to Freddie Gray before he died. 

here’s the evidence: rather than take Freddie Gray the short 2 minute drive from the arrest site to the police station (see left), he was deliberately driven recklessly for over 40 minutes (see right) around Baltimore, handcuffed and in the back of a police van, with no seatbelt, until his spine broke.

the terrifying thing is that this seems to happen a lot. earlier today, two more people came forward to testify that they were put through rough rides at the hands of the Baltimore PD. a 43-year-old man was charged with ‘public urination’ and given a rough ride that resulted in a spine fracture that rendered him quadriplegic until he died a month later. five years ago, a former Baltimore police officer admitted that rough rides are an “unsanctioned technique” in which police vans are driven to cause “injury or pain” to unbuckled, handcuffed detainees. rough rides are very much a Real Thing.

in case it needs repeating: Baltimore police deliberately drove recklessly with a cuffed, injured Freddie Gray in the back of a van with no belt – a 40 minute ride for a destination 2 minutes away. his spine was severed, and it killed him.

[salgentile-deactivated20190713]

It is important in moments like this to review the empirical evidence as it exists and plainly confront the reality of what has happened with honesty and precision. We have the video. What we saw was a man being choked to death. A medical examination has confirmed this. And what we also know to...

[salgentile-deactivated20190713]

I wrote last week regarding the Eric Garner case that it was important to be clear-eyed and precise about the empirical evidence as it exists. The same is true of the Senate’s damning, ghastly report on the CIA’s systematic use of torture on detainees in its custody.

It is unequivocally true...

[descentintotyranny-blog]

Horrifying revelations drip out as media continues to go through Senate Torture Report

12/9/14

[maxsitt]

This song could be 10x longer.

[ras-al-ghul-is-dead]

A silent protest in Love Park, downtown Philadelphia orchestrated by performance artists protesting the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The onslaught of passerby’s  wanting to take photos with the LOVE statue exemplifies the disconnect in American society.  Simply frame out the dead body, and it doesn’t exist.  In this event, artist activists staged a scene where Kieth A. Wallace, an Actor, pretended to be dead for an hour in front of the statue while others took turns holding a sign with “Call Us By Our Names” written on it.  

To see more photos from this performance, check out #CallUsByOurNames on Facebook. 

I am not a journalist, I am merely a friend of the artists involved.  I was not at this event.      

As the photos show, the social experiment and silent protest highlighted the peoples reaction in the foreground of the photo. In this context the people become the performance art, and the faux dead body becomes a backdrop.  As an artist, I don’t want to give you my interpretation of the art of these photos. They should speak for themselves.  But I did talk to Lee Edward Colston II, an actor, who was involved in the event.  

Here are some of his observations of the social interactions he witnessed: 

I don’t know who any of these folks are.

They were tourists I presume.

But I heard most of what everything they said. A few lines in particular stood out. There’s one guy not featured in the photos. His friends were trying to get him to join the picture but he couldn’t take his eyes off the body.

"Something about this doesn’t feel right. I’m going to sit this one out, guys." "Com’on man… he’s already dead."

(Laughs.)

There were a billion little quips I heard today. Some broke my heart. Some restored my faith in humanity. There was an older white couple who wanted to take a picture under the statue.

The older gentleman: “Why do they have to always have to shove their politics down our throats.” Older woman: “They’re black kids, honey. They don’t have anything better to do.”

One woman even stepped over the body to get her picture. But as luck would have it the wind blew the caution tape and it got tangle around her foot. She had to stop and take the tape off. She still took her photo.

There was a guy who yelled at us… “We need more dead like them. Yay for the white man!”

"One young guy just cried and then gave me a hug and said ‘thank you. It’s nice to know SOMEBODY sees me.’

#CallUsByOurNames

[maxsitt]

I'm Too Fragile for This: Rabbits.

[slaughterhouse90210]

“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky

[maxsitt]

Funny.