Make Ready: Safeguarding Our Movements against Repression
https://crimethinc.com/Safeguarding
Donald Trump has signaled that he is expanding his offensive against immigrants to target critics of his regime as well. In directing repression at an invented category ("antifa") rather than a specific organization or form of activity, he means to convey that regardless of who you are or what you do, you, too, could become a target.
Fortunately, there are already groups that have experience dealing with this kind of repression, and there are concrete steps we can all take to prepare our communities to weather the coming storm. Rather than spreading panic, this will enable us to approach this situation calmly and effectively.
americans are sooo desensitized to guns and sometimes it manifests in ways that affect your media literacy. like remember in the first episode of sherlock when john watson opens up his drawer and you see a gun in there and youre supposed to understand that this is narratively significant and conveys his suicidality as well as his willingness to skirt rules and laws but the first time i watched it i was like oh well theres his desk gun. lots of people have those
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database.
Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July.
Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.”
Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check.
A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas.
She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head.
A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April.
The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount.
And the cameras keep falling.
need everyone to know that the artist who created this iconic artwork:
is STILL creating wolf art TO THIS DAY. TEN YEARS LATER. proof that the world is beautiful. her username is wolfroad! you can find her art right here, and here are a few of her more recent pieces that I absolutely adore:
checked her page today and I think this might be because of everyone who saw this post and went to support her and show her art some love. the power of spotlighting an artist!! if you know an underappreciated artist, telling people about them could mean the world. [:
#they also have aragorn's elvish ancestors on their father's side! #as well as mithrellas on their mother's (via @bretwalda-lamnguin)
Yup! I think their Silvan-Elrosian-Edainic background is an interesting context for the emphasis on how staggeringly beautiful Boromir was, including Legolas's "he was so pretty, RIP" eulogy:
There was a tall man with a fair and noble face, dark-haired and grey-eyed
His fair and pleasant face was hideously changed
“From the mouths of the Sea the South Wind flies, from the sandhills and the stones,
The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moans,
‘What news from the South, O sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?
Where now is Boromir the Fair? He tarries and I grieve.”
His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest
His face [after death] was more beautiful even than in life
Pippin gazing at him [Faramir] saw how closely he resembled his brother Boromir ... looking on the fair face of Faramir, [Ioreth] wept
Meanwhile, the description of Boromir and Faramir's part-Silvan mother Finduilas:
She was a lady of great beauty and gentle heart, but before twelve years had passed she died. […S]he withered in the guarded city, as a flower of the seaward vales set upon a barren rock. The shadow in the east filled her with horror, and she turned her eyes ever south to the sea
[To Faramir, a small child when she died, she was] but a memory of loveliness in far days and of his first grief
Legolas, meeting Finduilas's younger brother, Imrahil, is struck yet again by this incredibly hot family:
At length they came to the Prince Imrahil, and Legolas looked at him and bowed low; for he saw that here indeed was one who had elven-blood in his veins.
“That is a fair lord and a great captain of men. If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising.”
Meanwhile, Boromir's father:
Denethor looked indeed much more like a great wizard than Gandalf did, more kingly, beautiful, and powerful; and older.
Denethor was a proud man, tall, valiant, and more kingly than any man that had appeared in Gondor for many lives of men
Indeed he [Denethor] was as like to Thorongil [Aragorn] as to one of nearest kin
[Denethor] was very tall and in appearance looked like an ancient Númenórean
his [Denethor’s] appearance of premature old age, first observable when he was not much above sixty years old (UT); he bought the knowledge dearly, being aged before his time (Appendix A)
Also: the passage that basically all the information specifically about Mithrellas and Imrazôr comes from (the Dol Amroth family tree in Peoples of Middle-earth) pretty strongly implies that the princes of Dol Amroth did not traditionally intermarry with the "royal offshoot" noble houses that got to use Quenya/were descended from the Noldor, Vanyar, Sindar, and Maiar via Anárion (multiple times over, undoubtedly), including the Stewards.
I'd guess this was only possible over that length of time as a very deliberate policy; the princes are described as nearly autonomous rulers of their own province apart from sending tribute (a form of taxes, presumably) to Minas Tirith, and they may have deliberately held themselves apart from the rest of Gondor and almost exclusively intermarried within the heavily Númenórean population of their own principality for most of its history. If so, it seems like Prince Adrahil had ... different priorities than pretty much all the preceding princes, given that his cousin married the heir to the throne of Rohan and this alliance carried weight with Adrahil's son, and Adrahil's daughter married the heir to the lordship of Gondor.
At any rate, the marriage of Denethor and Finduilas seems to have been envisioned as very probably the first time that the main part-Elvish "lineages" in Gondor intermarried—the descendants of Mithrellas and Imrazôr in Belfalas (a rumor confirmed by Legolas in LOTR) + the descendants of Anárion constituting the uppermost echelon of the Númenórean nobility elsewhere in Gondor, including the House of the Stewards. So the house of Dol Amroth, the other Númenórean houses they've intermarried with, and the house of Eorl are all descendants of Mithrellas, a Silvan Elf; Aragorn, the junior branches of the house of Isildur, and the Stewards and other nobles of "royal origin" are all descendants of Elendil and thus Elwing and Eärendil; Faramir and Boromir's Elvish heritage, therefore, includes Silvan Elves, Grey Elves, and High Elves (Noldor and Vanyar).
Honestly, I would guess this combination of Elvish heritages is pretty damn uncommon among Elves themselves. There's something—I don't know, a little bit apropos—about these factions of Elves, whose relationships with each other ranged from "tense" to "open warfare" over centuries, only becoming a single bloodline through the marriage of two mortals from Gondor, Denethor and Finduilas: strange and eldritch mortals with their own peculiar forms of development and aging, but doomed to die nevertheless, and both dying prematurely. Legolas's colony of Silvan Elves in Ithilien live under the aegis of a prince and princess, Faramir and Éowyn, who both owe their existences in part to a Silvan Elf fleeing into Gondor.
if completing tasks feels so good and reminds me completing tasks is easy then why is starting them the emotional equivalent of sending my first born to war
the world has been horrifying recently but i have personally witnessed something that brought me joy
Every year, California’s largest sheep and fiber festival, Lambtown, takes place in Dixon, CA. On the second day of Lambtown, teams of eight compete in a “sheep to shawl” competition, where the teams must start the day with un-spun wool and end the day with a 72” woven shawl. Teams may “warp” a loom ahead of time (where you thread the loom with its foundation of parallel threads), but on the day of competition they must spin their wool into yarn and weave it into a complete shawl.
This year competition was stiff, and very very close, and the winning team finished their shawl with two and a half minutes to spare.
I frequently hear about “needing to keep “politics” out of fiber arts, but art is inherently political.
These were beautiful, masterfully spun, woven, and finished shawls and that in itself is worthy of note.
But watching this team of eight would fight for hours, and pour their love for their community into their art was deeply moving and I am still reveling in the opportunity to have seen this win.
There are few things to rejoice in today, but they do exist. The horrors may persist, but so do we.
We reposted this epic thread by Jesse Hamm over on our Bluesky account. It was one of the best things Jesse ever wrote on twitter and we didn't want it languishing over there in that awful place, so we ported it over to Bluesky in its entirety. Go read it!
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