Some additional context.
For years, the Portland Police and the Department of Homeland Security have worked with fascist and far-right organizers to coordinate their demonstrations and facilitate their violence against anti-racist and anti-fascist counter-protesters as well as the general public. In June 2018, DHS worked directly with Gibson to plan a rally in downtown Portland during which fascists were permitted to attack counter-demonstrators with impunity. In early 2019, texts between far-right leader Joey Gibson and members of the Portland Police Bureau came to light, revealing that the police were feeding Gibson information, letting him know when his colleagues that were on probation needed to lay low, and informed him in advance about anti-fascist events and activities. Police faced no consequences for this.
—a joint statement by It’s Going Down and Crimethinc.
Some further context:
Before federal officers started dragging people into unmarked vans, PPB was pulling civilians out of their cars if they drove too close to the protests.
And but also:
Standing figures of a pioneer family, circa 1843. The parents stand to the back and their son stands between them in front. The father is bearded and wearing a long-sleeve shirt, trousers with suspenders and mid-calf boots. He points with his proper right hand and his proper left arm is around his wife, who wears a long prairie dress shawl, and apron. Her hair is in a bun, and she holds a doll to her chest in her proper left hand. The boy wears trousers with suspenders and his shirt sleeves are rolled up. He holds a Bible in his proper right hand, against his proper right leg. A wagon wheel and leaning rifle stand behind the father figure.
In conclusion: ACAB. Abolish prisons. Defund the police. ICE delenda est.
Always already again, again.
“So that’s the choice we face, my fellow Americans: between freedom and opportunity or socialism and decline. And I have no doubt, as all of us do all that we can, even in these challenging times between now and November 3rd, we’ll see our way through. We’ll be there for our neighbors and friends, we will heal our land, and then we will win a great victory for freedom and our very way of life. And with President Donald Trump in the White House for four more years, we’ll make America great again, again.”
Sapir-Whorffery.
A thread about the civil suit brought in the Southern District of New York by the Bronx Defenders, the Legal Aid Society, the Brooklyn Defender Service, the Queens Defenders, the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, and the New York County Defender Service against the Office of Court Administration and Chief Administrative Judge of the Unified Court System Lawrence K. Marks, regarding ill-conceived efforts to proceed with in-person court appearances during a raging (and accelerating) pandemic (a subject, you must understand, that I take somewhat personally), anyway, this Twitter thread rather rapidly dissolves as random people leap in to shout BUT OUR KID’S or But let’s send kids to school, which is just barely topic-adjacent, if you squint in the right and most generous light, but even so it’s so much static, record-scratch catchphrases shouted at random (pro? or con?) because maybe they just might stick to the protein coating of the thread, much like the more obvious ejaculates of yore: BUT HER EMAILS; nevertheless, she persisted; ah, well, nevertheless. —I never much liked the Darmok episode of Star Trek, but I gotta admit: if you want Shaka, when the walls fell, welp: this is how you get Shaka, when the walls fell. —Or Ascians. I bet we end up Ascians.
A perspective of privilege.
Donald Trump, Jr., says he’s assembled some pages from his anti-Biden Burn Book into a tome that he’ll self-publish to “send a shot across the bow” of traditional publishing, and oh, honey, let me stop you right there. —When I say I’m self-publishing to send a shot across the bow of traditional publishing, everybody laughs, because the shot’s at most a limp spit-wad that can’t even make it from the back row of the classroom, much less across any multinational bows, but when you say you’re self-publishing, Junior, everybody laughs, because your shot across the bow is apparently so appallingly self-evidently spectacularly self-owningly shitty that the world-famous influence suck-ups of Regnery Publishing can’t even be bothered to launder a bribe through bookclub-to-landfill purchases. —You’ll still make a gasping fortune, you failson fuck, enough that would more than better the lives of dozens of others so much better than ever you could be, but hey: we’ll still be able to laugh at you, long after you toddle your fortuneless way to that bourne from which no traveler returns.
Meanwhile.
“My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids, I’ll think about the separations differently, but I don’t think so. DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself, to try to make me more compassionate, but it didn’t work.”
“It didn’t work? I will never forget what I saw. —Seriously. Are you a white nationalist?”
“No, but I believe if you come to America, you should assimilate. Why do we need to have ‘Little Havana’?”
As a rule of thumb, anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as “ugliness and bigotry” the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has, for that reason alone, no business involving himself in Republican affairs.
—Matthew Scully, proudly stood athwart what he thinks to be history
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains—
“In this formulation of society, what matters is what generates a ‘culture’ that leaves ‘us [writers] room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.’ A little dabble of transphobia to get the blood flowing, as it were. A letter more attuned to material reality might observe that, for most people, there is little, if any, ‘room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes’ in modern society. Most Americans are an unexpected medical bill or car crash away from bankruptcy. Black people, in particular, need not even actually engage in any ‘experimentation, risk taking, or mistakes’ for their lives to be ruined, or taken from them. What was Tamir Rice’s mistake? Breonna Taylor’s? But the ability of non-writers to make mistakes without being ground to dust by the economy and the state is not ‘the lifeblood of a liberal society.’ People are not the lifeblood of the letter’s ideal society. No, it is J.K. Rowling’s tweets that are the lifeblood of society. Not, you know, actual lives or actual blood.” —Julius the Intern
Things fall apart.
“The US’s decline started with little things,” is how they tease the article, which, I mean, “little things,” but hey, it’s Bloomberg, they’re trying, so you’re reading your way down the list, empty construction sites, okay, capricious hospital bills, sure, and, uh—
—I mean, I know the rich are different from you an’ me, but do they really want to go and flaunt it in the dek like that?
Six percent! Mothering fuck.
Anyway. —Any decline in the United States isn’t starting, it’s accelerating, signed by things that are anything but little—and the heights from which we’re falling were only ever notional for just about most everybody. The City was only ever Shining thanks to the efforts of folks who were never allowed to live in it, and the Hill it’s built on’s a rotten foundation, prone to subsidence with the slightest shock. Forget Bloomberg; Tressie McMillan Cottom has much more pertinent things to say about the pandemic, and the always already cracks it’s made impossible to ignore.
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist’rous ruin.
Also, I gotta admit, I did not have Graham “Glinner” Linehan gets suspended from Twitter for accusing a trans professor of grooming her students and then creates an account on a prominent gender-critical internet forum to fret about possibly losing his blue tick only to get booted again for being a male barging into a female space on my 2020 Bingo Card.
#HasMayorKrewsonLandedYet
“St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson took some time out from a public briefing on COVID-19 Friday to read aloud the full names and addresses of several of her own constituents who are calling for police reform.”
Bug inkling.
“Holla at ya boy!” he joyfully cries, decked out Boogaloo-style, Big Luau Aloha shirt under a tactical vest, over a Big Igloo T-shirt, summoning his posse to defend a statue of Cristoffa Corombo and thus by extension the entirety of the unquestionably superior culture of Western White Straight Masculinely Muscular Judeo-Christian Enlightenment from uncultured antifa soy hordes, and I swear to God it’s the unthinking cognitive dissonance that’ll do me in in the end—
Even-the-liberal.
“Governors nationwide have pursued similarly limited initiatives. This is the reform conjured by focus groups and vetted by police unions, not the one backed by data. Five decades of mass incarceration have so thoroughly limited the imagination of political elites that even a pandemic cannot dislodge their belief in the necessity of mass incarceration. Their refusal of a broad humanitarian release of incarcerated senior citizens serving lengthy sentences—really the lowest of bars—reveals, in its absurd perversity, a deeper truth: even the most liberal of US governors would rather risk their prisons turning into mass graves than offer the faintest of admissions that mass incarceration is a colossal failure and unnecessary for public safety.” —Dan Berger
For, indeed, the watch ought to offend no one, and it is an offence to stay anyone against their will.
A socially distanced rally is a strange thing: but Neysa Bogar read Audre Lorde, and Renee Manes carried a sign that said Public Defenders Telling You That Cops Lie For 50+ Years, and even though we couldn’t hug each other, or rub shoulders, the energy was righteous, and the chants, though slightly muffled, still rang out, and one of those chants was DEFUND THE POLICE, and that’s the strangest thing, to me, at least, about the past mad wild upsetting unsettling enraging couple of weeks? —That this idea, that seemed an uncertain step too far when I first encountered through links to Mariame Kaba‘s Twitter feed, that firmed up underfoot as I read about it and sat with it and thought through it until I came around to the point I could say, yes, we must abolish prisons; yes, we must defund the police, all of them, right down to the ground; yes, we have no choice but to do the work to build a world where life is precious, so that life might be precious: that this wild mad desperately necessarily eutopian idea is suddenly lurching into view through the Overton window, to the point that John Oliver can do a whole dam’ show about it, on HBO.
Defund the police.
But for those who still find themselves clung to the notion of reform (radical, to be sure; meaningful; even bold), or those whose abolitionary imaginary only reaches to medieval Iceland—it occurs to me, that Dogberry’s advice to the watch might well prove an excellent basis for a retraining program for our thin blue lines. —Anyway, it’s a start. Policing delenda est.
The most relevantly framed.
DOGBERRY
This is your charge: you shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand, in the Prince’s name.SECOND WATCH
How, if a’ will not stand?DOGBERRY
Why, then, take no note of him, but let him go; and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave.VERGES
If he will not stand when he is bidden, he is none of the Prince’s subjects.DOGBERRY
True, and they are to meddle with none but the Prince’s subjects. You shall also make no noise in the streets: for, for the watch to babble and to talk is most tolerable and not to be endured.SECOND WATCH
We will rather sleep than talk: we know what belongs to a watch.DOGBERRY
Why, you speak like an ancient and most quiet watchman, for I cannot see how sleeping should offend; only have a care that your bills be not stolen. Well, you are to call at all the alehouses, and bid those that are drunk get them to bed.SECOND WATCH
How if they will not?DOGBERRY
Why then, let them alone till they are sober: if they make you not then the better answer, you may say they are not the men you took them for.
The most renowned.
SECOND WATCH
Well, sir.DOGBERRY
If you meet a thief, you may suspect him, by virtue of your office, to be no true man; and, for such kind of men, the less you meddle or make with them, why, the more is for your honesty.SECOND WATCH
If we know him to be a thief, shall we not lay hands on him?DOGBERRY
Truly, by your office, you may; but I think they that touch pitch will be defiled. The most peaceable way for you, if you do take a thief, is to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company.VERGES
You have been always called a merciful man, partner.DOGBERRY
Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any honesty in him.VERGES
If you hear a child cry in the night, you must call to the nurse and bid her still it.SECOND WATCH
How if the nurse be asleep and will not hear us?DOGBERRY
Why then, depart in peace, and let the child wake her with crying; for the ewe that will not hear her lamb when it baes, will never answer a calf when he bleats.VERGES
’Tis very true.DOGBERRY
This is the end of the charge. You constable, are to present the Prince’s own person: if you meet the Prince in the night, you may stay him.VERGES
Nay, by’r lady, that I think, a’ cannot.DOGBERRY
Five shillings to one on’t, with any man that knows the statutes, he may stay him: marry, not without the Prince be willing; for, indeed, the watch ought to offend no man, and it is an offence to stay a man against his will.VERGES
By’r lady, I think it be so.DOGBERRY
Ha, ah, ha! Well, masters, good night: an there be any matter of weight chances, call up me: keep your fellows’ counsels and your own, and good night. Come, neighbour.SECOND WATCH
Well, masters, we hear our charge: let us go sit here upon the church bench till two, and then all to bed.
The most generously apportioned.
Notes from the day job.
Lisa Hay, Oregon’s federal public defender, said 34 of her office’s clients—offenders sentenced for federal crimes in Oregon—are scattered in eight private prisons in Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“I’m concerned about our clients being held in private prisons because there seems to be no reporting on the level of coronavirus infections in those facilities,” Hay said.
“I don’t know if they are even testing inmates.”
The coronavirus, Hay said, has exposed how detention in private prisons may “result in unequal and inadequate treatment of inmates.”
That gum you like is going to come back in style.
Lili Loofbourow manages to make me feel if not good about a Biden candidacy, at least, I mean, well, sort of better?
Look, I saw this great opportunity to corner the market in Egyptian cotton.
That’s, ah, that’s normally how things work, right? So I’m not here to disrupt, ah, a supply chain, so, look. These distributors, these six distributors, six, seven, they have six to seven hundred warehouses. They have trucks that go to the hospital door every day. We’re bringing product in, they’re filling orders for hospitals, nursing homes, like normal. I’m putting volume into that system. I would say that, in—we have the data now, last—so we put together, this, ah, data element, over, the last, you know, what, thirteen days? Get the people in, look at the problem, build this—I am now seeing truth, about what’s in the supply chain? And I would say, um, there’s been some abnormal behavior? Okay?
The federal government—our federal government—is giving supplies from the national stockpile to six, or maybe seven distributors to then sell to the states, our states, us, at a healthy hollow laugh profit, and while we need to have everyone responsible drummed out of power, their money seized, their power and possessions nationalized, turned to some small public good, what we at the very least deserve is some sort of truth and reconciliation commission, where all involved admit to their wrong-doing and apologize and swear on whatever they hold holy never to do it again, even if they don’t ever actually have to pay anything meaningful for having done so, the best, the ever actual uttermost best we can ever hope for is maybe in ten years or so one of them decides to leverage some spare change from under their couch into a teevee show about some charmingly sharpish con artists Robin Hooding an entirely notional fortune or two from some thinly fictionalized versions of these fothermucking monsters, ah well, nevertheless.
Capitalism!
“This failure accounts for at least some of the tens of thousands of pending tests reflected in the state’s reported numbers. According to experts, it isn’t Quest’s fault that the company has so far been unable to meet the technical challenge of testing thousands of people every day. Setting up such “high throughput” operations is difficult. But Quest failed to come to terms with its ongoing problems, and it continued to accept specimens—and generate revenue—when other laboratories could have done some of the tests faster.”
Capitalism!
“I am not saying these universities shouldn’t do something charitable for their workers. They should, if only to maintain amicable relations within the university community itself. I am saying that their moral obligation to extend charity to those workers is not very strong. Had such charity been prioritized in the past, the US never would have developed and maintained top universities. Part of America’s greatness as a nation, and as an innovator, is its unwillingness to ask anew every day whether its elite accumulations of wealth should be torn down and rededicated to everyday purposes of a supposedly greater benevolence.”
