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trying on a metaphor
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@unrojoamanecer
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitter-zunzuneo-stir-unrest
USAid started ZunZuneo, a social network built on texts, in hope it could be used to organize 'smart mobs' to trigger Cuban spring
A classic
Why is there a dick & ass in the notes of this...
This is environmental racism
The implosion of an old coal plant in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood has sparked new controversy and also plans for a lawsuit.
Coal plant developer acknowledged not following demolition plan, Chicago's mayor says.
Accelerationism is the obscure idea that’s inspiring white supremacist killers around the world.
god. this is a lot
You know when you go into something knowing a situation is horrible and then realize you had no fucking clue? Read this
Sort of a tangent, but climate change discussions are a prime example of just how insidious accelerationist rhetoric can be. I've lost count of how many times I've seen blackpill talking points come out of the mouths of oblivious liberals. Usually white. Overpopulation, austerity policies, conspiracies about crisis response. Even the wannabe Rambo ass apocalypse fantasies are, at their core, reactionary.
But something like "overpopulation is the problem" sounds right to someone who doesn't know how reactionary politics function. It seems like an obvious, indisputable fact when one doesn't learn how to untangle the deeper implications behind political statements. So a lot of (white) liberals are especially susceptible to the type of recruiting that cryptofascists prefer to employ.
My brother, who would be horrified to know the origins of his belief, thoroughly believes the overpopulation lie. He's a Terminally Online Zoomer opinionated white guy who is a perfect target for accelerationists: not at all likely to participate in their horrendous violence, but very likely to absorb the rhetoric that makes him feel paralyzed, apathetic, and misanthropic while they detonate the world around him.
If we care about stopping this tide of fascism, we are obligated to learn the ways in which they've camouflaged themselves. The term "dogwhistle" gets bandied about a lot, and applied to things like the (((three parentheses))), which has quickly moved from dog whistle to open, unabashed antisemitism. The actual dog whistles, the ones we need to be aware of and ready to critique, often sound on the surface like normal conversations.
If, like the previous commenter, you feel horrified by the scope of the problem, the quickest way to start getting active is to get intimately familiar with their rhetoric, their codes, the underpinnings of their politics, and the machinery that makes fascism run.
really good thank you for writing this
“Like neoreaction, neo-Nazi accelerationism holds that the liberal-democratic order is a failure — that we should move beyond it toward a better future, and that the task of political action should be to accelerate the speed of that transformation. Only in their view, that “better future” is not capitalist authoritarianism, but the total collapse of a degenerate and corrupt Western society — and the rebirth, out of its ashes, of a new political order more hospitable to white domination.”
________________________ This is what I’ve been talking about on here with regards to the anti-capitalist right.
Leftists (especially those who are not strongly involved in antifascist work) need to be very careful in anti-capitalist spaces, because there are multiple strands of fascist anti-capitalist movements that seek to destroy Western governments as a goal. There is a ‘revolutionary right’ and they absolutely will use Leftist action to their own benefit to take power and implement their own vision of society based in white cis male supremacy and eugenics.
Not everyone who is anti-US government or anti-capitalist or anti-centralized government is a comrade. Leftists need to forefront our fight against racism (esp anti-blackness), antisemitism, misogyny (esp transmisogyny), and eugenics. Our primary goal as leftists needs to be based in liberation movements and the inherent value of individuals’ life, freedom, and bodily autonomy.
And imo, we need to focus much more on building mutual aid networks and laying the framework for the societies we want and need in a post-revolution world, because if all our energy is poured into toppling the current capitalist structure without having a robust plan in place for what follows, then our world will quickly fall to fascists who are already planning out how they want society structured.
Air Force officials are investigating after an A-10C Thunderbolt II fighter jet on a training mission accidentally fired a rocket near Tucson. Officials at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base say the M-156 rocket landed Thursday morning in a remote desert wash near Mount Graham.
They say there were no injuries, damage or fires from the accidental launch of the white phosphorus projectile in the Jackal Military Operations Area, which is about 60 miles northeast of Tucson.
Just to be clear white phosphorus is a banned chemical weapon, so we are loading up our jets with banned weapons of war near the border. White phosphorus literally sticks to and melts your skin, it burns your lungs, causes organ failure, and kills you. The after-effects of those who survive these chemical attacks are brutal.
In Fallujah, we also illegally used white phosphorus - this was to make the “enemy forces” move from their cover. Now PLEASE tell me how I’m supposed to believe that this was an accident? The military “accidently” loaded up weapons to their fighter jets that are banned by international law and “accidently” dropped one close to a border town and we’re supposed to believe nothing is going on?
This should be bigger news - why the fuck is our military loading fighter jets with illegal chemical weapons near the border and indigenous reservations?
Comcast's lobby failed to stop launch of Fort Collins municipal broadband.
A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city’s voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it.
“Finally, a broadband provider you can trust,” the city-run broadband service’s website says in a pointed message about the Comcast cable and CenturyLink DSL services that are the city’s primary broadband networks.
Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There’s a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on.
Connexion is only available in a small portion of the city right now.
“The initial number of homes we’re targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume,” Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion’s fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city’s homes and businesses, Shanley said the city’s plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years.
“Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont,” another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today.
The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000.
Ballot question
In November 2017, voters in Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build the broadband network.
The Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA), of which Comcast is a member, donated $815,000 toward a campaign against the ballot initiative. The Chamber of Commerce also opposed the plan. Comcast didn’t participate in the campaign publicly, but the company would have been the main beneficiary of a vote against the municipal option.
In all, the industry-led opposition spent more than $900,000 fighting the ballot question, while the pro-broadband group led by residents spent about $15,000.
Before the election, a study by a pro-municipal broadband group estimated that “Competition in Fort Collins would cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year.”
Read More
On the issue of China’s status as an imperialist power, we have to get clear on what imperialism actually is. The question shouldn’t be “is China doing everything perfect,” but rather, “what role does China play in the international economy?”
I live in New Zealand, so I’ll contrast to here - because New Zealand is, for one thing, generally regarded as a benign little country in complete contrast to China’s international reputation, and because for another thing, New Zealand is categorically an imperialist power, albeit a shitty little one.
New Zealand has two major facets to its international relations: one, it directly rules some territories in the Pacific as protectorates. Of these, Kiribati is non-self governing and is legislated by the New Zealand parliament; Niue and the Cook Islands are self-governing but are both economically dependent upon the New Zealand government and subject to our own foreign policy agenda.
The other facet to New Zealand’s imperialist role is actually the more major one, our role as a financial hub in the Pacific. This means that for one thing, we flood the Pacific with cheap exports that make local economies impossible - you cannot produce and sell many products cheaper than New Zealand can in your own islands, so regional economies are utterly stunted in ways that benefit New Zealand. Secondly, we use our diplomatic strength to force the governments of these countries to maintain trade relations with us in a way that requires them to accept our terms. This lets us treat the Pacific as our backyard and dumping ground, keeping these small island economies as shock absorbers for our agricultural markets.
In contrast, China neither directly rules any territories nor maintains satellites, colonies or semi-colonies.
The government of the PRC is a series of nested committees, each accountable to the mass base of the population as well as the committees below it. Regions that have become cause celebres among western liberals due to concerns over human rights violations such as Xinjiang or Tibet are classified as Autonomous Regions, with their own local governments accountable to the minority ethnic groups these Autonomous Regions were created to serve. It’s simply not true to claim that these regions are colonies of the PRC - at the very least, we have to acknowledge that these are governments run by the minority ethnic groups that enjoy the popular support of these ethnic groups. It’s deeply chauvinist for western states to pick and choose the minor rebel groups in these areas to choose to support, when they’re both unpopular and unrepresentative of the general wishes of the people who actually live in these Autonomous Regions.
Secondly, the PRC’s economic policy is fundamentally different to those of western states. Where imperialist powers use the loan-debt-interest-structural adjustment cycle to break the backs of their colonies and force these states to adopt policy that keep the subordinate to the big powers, China’s international finance role has actually facilitated regional development and autonomy. Chinese loans come at interest rates far lower than states could access from imperialist institutions, and the Chinese government has a department whose responsibility is paying off the interest that the Chinese government itself is charging on loans. This level of debt forgiveness is actually only the first step - when countries have to default on loan payments to China, a study by the US-based Rhodium Group found that China almost never seizes assets to make up the cost. What they found was that almost without exception, China renegotiates loans to find a repayment rate that the borrower can maintain, or more often, straight up just forgives the debt. Looking over the last few years, researchers could find two instances where this didn’t happen. The example we’re often given of China taking ownership of a Sri Lankan port was one of two times China ever gained ownership of land in response to a debt default.
The things we’re told about the PRC are heavily distorted. Americans, in particular, need to be aware that they are living in the lead up to a world-spanning conflict between their government and the PRC. If you aren’t even trying to investigate the actual situation, you will be fed lies.
Do you know that Africa exists and China is colonizing parts of Africa 🙄
The research I am citing found that out of 22 loans the Chinese foreign lending department has made to African states in the last decade, it has written off billions of USD in loans rather than tightening sanctions, allowing interest to snowball into uncontrollable debt, or seizing assets. As far as I can tell, China has only ever seized assets twice - in Sri Lanka and Tajikistan. Frankly, neither China’s foreign lending practices nor these two isolated and now seemingly non-standard instances of asset seizure are in any way comparable to either colonialism or to contemporary economic imperialism.
When imperialist countries like the USA, or the World Bank, have a third-world nation on the line for more than $170 million USD, they demand structural adjustments and economic reforms that deepen imperialism in that country. When Cameroon owed China $178 million USD, China wrote the debt off. When Ghana owed China $1.6 billion USD, China wrote the debt off. When Zimbabwe owed China $100 million USD, China wrote the debt off. That is not what an imperialist power does, and that is not what colonialism is. You are repeating the standard lie, that China is engaged in “debt-trap diplomacy” without there being any actual evidence in practice that this the case at all! This is exactly the kind of imperialist propaganda that Americans will need to come to learn to recognise if they want any chance of making it through the coming conflict between the USA and the PRC without goosestepping into fervent nationalism.
you know who doesnt get a fair share of criticism for its rampant racism, anti-semitism, islamophobia and complete lack of remorse or reparations for its sordid colonial past? France
Claiming your $125 from Equifax is a "moral duty"
If you fill in this form, Equifax will send you $125 as part of its settlement with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the FTC, and 48 out of 50 states.
Equifax doxed the nation and profited handsomely from it. $125 is a laughably small sum given how much damage the data they hemorrhaged all over the internet could cause you. Equifax should have faced the corporate death penalty, the execs who oversaw the disaster should have had their assets seized and diverted to anti-identity-theft measures and charities.
Instead, the FTC et al are hitting the company for a maximum of $700m (how much they pay depends in part on whether you fill in this form. Equifax’s market cap stands today at $16.6B, and it posted $3.412B in earnings in 2018, up 1.48% increase from 2017.
As meaningless as the $125 is, as piddling as the $700m is, you should still do this. As Josephine Wolff writes for Slate, breaches should be as expensive as possible. Anything you can do to make them more expensive will help people inside companies who are arguing against data-collection and retention, making the world safer for everyone else. Anything you can do to make breaches more expensive will hit the share price of companies that overcollect our data.
Go on, do it.
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/26/soak-em.html
DO NOT TAKE THE FREE CREDIT MONITORING. TAKE THE MONEY.
Credit monitoring is already a free service. If you don’t already have it, go sign up for creditkarma.com, then fill out the settlement form and get your $125. My mom signed me up for Credit Karma as soon as I turned 18 and it’s one of the best things she ever did for me.
For those of you familiar with the story of Baby H, here is a petition to get her home.
For those unfamiliar, Baby H was seized June 14th from her loving Indigenous family by social workers after the hospital reported her mother for failing to take care of her when she was medicated 90 minutes after a c section.
The baby has since been bounced through at least 5 foster homes, some non-Indigenous. Social workers are not communicating properly with the family, and even refused to continue meetings when the family attempted to record them for their protection. Some of the justifications for this action include outright lies (ie the claim that the parents are homeless. they actually have a 2 bedroom apartment.) Source
Social workers and the Canadian government have been doing this since confederation. They will take any possible excuse to remove Indigenous children from their families and communities. This is one of many ways they continue to attack our cultures and people. Just look at the foster care statistics in Canada:
When undocumented immigrants are detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), they are held in detention until they go to trial where the court will decide whether they can stay in the country. In some cases, the immigration judge will let them go while they await trial if they first pay a bail bond. Bail is set at a legal minimum of $1,500, but can be much higher. The bond is meant as a deposit to ensure the accused will report to their trial. If they attend all of their court appointments, they can get the money back. But many people have trouble coming up with the funds. The average bail bond issued by the San Francisco immigration courts in 2014 was $3,411 and the average cost of bond in immigration courts nationally is $6,500. Bond amounts could be as high as $80,500 on Central District of California immigration bonds, according to a 2015 study by USC law professor Emily Ryo. Donating to community bond funds can immediately “lead to freedom,” she said. Community bond funds are charities, like RAICES, that use funds to post bail and provide legal defense for detained people.This is one of the fastest ways to reunite immigrants with their family, said Pilar Weiss, project director at the National Bail Fund Network.
DIRECTORY OF CRIMINAL SYSTEM BAIL FUNDS
National organizations funding bail across the U.S.
National Bail Out
The American Bar Association
Queer Detainee Empowerment Project
Freedom for Immigrants
Local organizations funding bail for immigrants
Arizona Tucson Second Chance Bail Fund Colorado Colorado Freedom Fund California Bay Area Immigration Bond Fund Immigrant Families Defense Fund The Orange County Justice Fund Connecticut Connecticut Bail Fund Immigrant Bail Fund Florida LGBTQ Freedom Fund Hawaii Hawaii Community Bail Fund Illinois Champaign County Bailout Coalition Chicago Community Bond Fund Iowa Eastern Iowa Community Bond Project Kentucky Louisville Community Bail Fund Louisiana New Orleans Safety & Freedom Fund YWCA Greater Baton Rouge Community Bail Fund Massachusetts Massachusetts Bail Fund Minnesota Minnesota Freedom Fund Nebraska Omaha Freedom Fund Nevada Vegas Freedom Fund New York City Bronx Freedom Fund Brooklyn Community Bail Fund Lorena Borjas Community Fund WSLS Bail Fund New York State Columbia County Bail Fund EOC of Suffolk Inc. Charitable Bail Fund OAR of Tompkins County Bail Fund Syracuse Jail Ministry North Carolina Southern Coalition for Social Justice Bail Fund Alamance County Community Bail Fund North Carolina Community Bail Fund of Durham Oregon Portland Freedom Fund Pennsylvania Dauphin County Bail Fund Philadelphia Community Bail Fund Philadelphia Bail Fund Tennessee Hamilton County Community Bail Fund Memphis Community Bail Fund Nashville Community Bail Fund Texas Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee Fianza Fund Community Bail Fund of North Texas Virginia Richmond Community Bail Fund Roanoke Community Bail Fund Charlottesville Community Resilience Fund Washington Northwest Community Bail Fund Wisconsin Free the 350 Bail Fund
DIRECTORY OF IMMIGRATION BOND FUNDS National organizations across the U.S.
Freedom for Immigrants National Bond Fund
Haitian Immigrant Bond Assistance Project
LGBTQ Freedom Fund
RAICES Bond Fund
Arizona Pima Monthly Meeting Immigration Bond Fund California Bay Area Immigration Bond Fund Immigrant Families Defense Fund Orange County Justice Fund San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium – Borderlands Get Free Fund Colorado Immigrant Freedom Fund of Colorado Connecticut Immigrant Bail Fund Iowa Eastern Iowa Community Bond Project Massachusetts Beyond Bail & Legal Defense Fund Michigan Kent County Immigration Bond for Our Neighbor’s Defense Fund Minnesota Minnesota Freedom Fund New Hampshire NH Conference UCC Immigrant and Refugee Support Group New York LIFE Bond Fund (New Sanctuary Coalition)New York Immigrant Freedom Fund Ohio (includes Northern Kentucky) 3R Fund for Immigrants Texas Fronterizo Fianza Fund Hutto Community Deportation Defense & Bond Fund RAICES Texas Bond Fund Vermont Vermont Freedom Bail Fund Virginia Cville Immigrant Bond Fund Washington Fair Fight Immigrant Bond Fund
The U.S. military appears to believe it can somehow prevail in a nuclear war, according to a Pentagon document that was briefly made public, and has plans for using atomic weapons in “small and limited” capacities in order to create “strategic stability” for itself in the world. The document, Nuclear Operations (pdf), describes the current political …
Pentagon Releases, Then Deletes, Document Detailing Use of Nuclear Weapons to Restore ‘Strategic Stability’ for US Military
While you were sleeping…
Highly recommended and disturbing.
Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.
In the ruling for Wiley v. State, the court emphasized that officers had violated the “personal liberty of both Capt. Bates and the deceased,” who, “having committed no crime, were entitled to proceed on their way without interruption or molestation.” This presented a broad statement on the rights of drivers. Entitling them to proceed on their way without interruption or molestation necessarily included the corresponding right to decide for themselves whether officers had legal cause to stop them. If they decided that an officer did not, then they would have had the additional right to refuse to pull over. Indeed, the court made this exact suggestion when it stated hypothetically that even if “the Bateses had heard [the officers’] outcries and refused to stop, no inference of guilt could have been reasonably drawn therefrom,” a mandatory inference to justify an interference with the Bateses’ right “to proceed on their way.” The rules of the road according to the Arizona Supreme Court would have made it extremely difficult for officers to stop a car they found suspicious. This was the world of Wiley v. State, when the police were few in number, easily mistaken for highwaymen, and limited in their authority over innocent citizens.
A century later, on July 10, 2015, a Texas state trooper pulled over Sandra Bland for failing to use a turn signal. After a tense dialogue, the traffic stop quickly came to a violent end. The trooper first tried to yank the young black woman from the car before forcing her out with a Taser gun. He then arrested Bland, who was lying face down, crying, and screaming in pain. Three days later, Bland was found dead in her jail cell. A year later, the Nation published an article that asked the question that had become a viral hashtag, #WhatHappenedtoSandraBland? To find the answer, the article examined Bland’s life, beginning with her birth to a single mother in Chicago’s West Side. The answer, according to the writer, was not just the neglectful conditions in that Texas county jail that led to her death. The answer was also unemployment, insufficient mental health care, and draconian drug laws.
But another motif, never named, loomed throughout the article. The automobile appeared in nearly every significant setback in Bland’s life. Exorbitant traffic tickets that Bland paid for by “sitting out” in jail. Convictions for driving under the influence and arrest warrants for unpaid traffic fines that severely limited her employment options. Charges for possessing marijuana—her lawyer suspected that Bland was self-medicating—that the police discovered in her car. In Bland’s life, the automobile played a prominent role as a site of violence, poverty, and discrimination.
The overpolicing of cars is a fact of life for people of color in the United States. Although Bland was not killed during the traffic stop, in 2015, the year of her death, 27 percent of police killings of unarmed citizens began with a traffic stop. Bland herself had been increasingly vocal on social media against police abuse and violence against African Americans, especially when the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum after a police officer fatally shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. It turned out that what had happened in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, was part of a larger trend. The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department and found “a pattern of unconstitutional policing” that skewed along racial lines. Most encounters with law enforcement, the report concluded, began with a traffic stop, an experience that disproportionately befell Ferguson’s black residents. In 2014 its municipal court had roughly 53,000 traffic cases, compared with about 50,000 nontraffic cases. This pattern was not limited to Ferguson. In their book In Context: Understanding Police Killings of Unarmed Citizens, scholars Nick Selby, Ben Singleton, and Ed Flosi concluded, “No form of direct government control comes close to [traffic] stops in sheer numbers, frequency, proportion of the population affected, and in many instances, the degree of coercive intrusion.”
What is the history that can account for the changes from Wiley v. State to Sandra Bland? Today, it would be improbable that Mrs. Bates, a wealthy white woman sitting in the passenger seat next to her influential husband, would be killed in a police shooting. Such tragedy now happens almost exclusively to minority drivers. Contrary to what one might expect, though, the social and legal developments that made the systematic policing of minorities possible did not originate with an intention to do so.
Instead, the shift began with the mass production of the automobile and the immediate imperative to regulate the motoring public. Before cars, U.S. police had more in common with their eighteenth-century forebears than with their twentieth-century successors. What revolutionized policing was a technological innovation that would come to define the new century. In the span of a century, towns and cities throughout the country—and not just in metropolitan centers—expanded their forces and professionalized beat cops, turning them into “law enforcement officers.” Figures are hard to come by, but one early report indicated that in the sixteen smallest states, the number of officers as a percentage of the population nearly doubled from 1910 to 1930.
Those who became subject to regular police surveillance included not just criminals in getaway cars but, more importantly, and for the first time, the respectable class of citizens who were the automobile’s early adopters. The need to discipline drivers and to do so without giving offense necessitated changes to the police function and to well-established laws. Officers now required discretion to administer the massive traffic enforcement regime and deal with the sensitivities of “law-abiding” citizens who kept violating traffic laws. The law’s accommodation of discretionary policing profoundly altered what it meant to live free from state intrusion in the automotive age. By the Cold War, U.S. society’s dependence on the police to maintain order raised troubling comparisons with totalitarian police. Unforeseen by midcentury jurists, their solution to the potential arbitrary policing of everyone led directly to the problem of discriminatory policing against minorities. Only by considering how U.S. society as a whole came to be policed can we more fully understand the history of our criminal justice and its troubled present.
we need to stop hating on gamers and youtube reaction channels and focus on the common enemy: people who do keto
