“If we have lost our faith in them, we have also lost our fear of them.”
The violence that has flared up in the North East district does not appear to be a spontaneous clash between the two communities following the road occupations. It seemed to be a consequence of a slow and deliberate political build-up. On 23 February, Kapil Mishra, a prominent leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi, visited Babarpur and threatened the anti-CAA protesters. He was accompanied by people who he claimed were supporters of the CAA. He told the crowd that he would give a three-day ultimatum to the police to clear the Jaffrabad road or else he would handle the matter himself. As Mishra addressed the crowd, Ved Prakash, the deputy commissioner of police of the North East district, stood beside him and made no attempt to stop him or curb his provocative speech. According to the Muslim residents of Jaffrabad and Vijay Park, the mob supporting the CAA started attacking Muslim houses in the localities barely minutes after Mishra left the venue that day.
On the night of 24 February, as I spoke to the mob supporting the CAA at Babarpur, I saw Prakash walk up to the members of the mob amid chants of “Delhi Police zindabad” and shake hands with them. Prakash’s reception by the Hindu mob was not unusual. Every time a police vehicle passed through the armed mob, the mob cheered them—some of them were casually chatting with the police with their sticks and lathis in hand. It seemed as if the armed mob was unafraid of the police.
In contrast, there was a deep distrust among the Muslim population towards the police. At Vijay Park, some of the residents told me that they had seen police assault Muslims along with the Hindu right-wing mob. The residents told me that they did not trust the police anymore and were as scared of them as of the rampaging armed right-wing mobs. The residents said that on 23 February, the police were chanting “Jai Shri Ram” as they charged at Muslim neighbourhoods along with the Hindu mobs. I, too, witnessed a deeply antagonistic attitude by the police which was deployed in the Muslim localities. The personnel stationed in Jaffrabad did not mingle with the anti-CAA protesters or even attempt to talk to them, in sharp relief to their bonhomie with even the armed mob supporting the CAA.
Reëducatable.
Bunch of skeevy assholes who clutched their pearls at the very idea that someone might call the concentration camps on our borders “concentration camps” now joke with each other about being the first against the wall in the Berniebro Gulag, ha ha.
Idaho Purchase.
Speaking of maps (as just we were)—
I guess Oregon conservatives don’t want to drive too far the next time they flee the state to deny the legislature a quorum. —“They’re not leaving very much for us,” said the kid over breakfast. We reassured each other that, despite the website and the petitions for ballot measures, this was entirely a money-grubbing publicity stunt, not unlike Greater West Virginia. “Red states” and extractive industries and internal colonization, go figure.
Of course, conservatives always break number four, and we do live in the Age of Trump. God knows what might happen. Still, you gotta wonder: why do the secessionist earls of Eastern Oregon hate Eastern Washington so much?
How to be Gibson.
“Like many of her colleagues at K2 Intelligence, Kotsianas originally trained as a reporter,” is one of those en passant sentences that clotheslines you with an entire sf novel’s worth of worldshifting.
Vincent Adultman by a nose.
“Bernie Sanders isn’t the frontrunner in the Democratic race. The moderates are” is just a slightly smarter centrist take on “Look at all the red counties on the electoral college map and tell me Trump can’t win!”
January, February, March, April, May, I'm alive
June, July, August, September, October, I'm alive
November, December, you all through the winter,
I'm alive
I'm alive...
Here’s a copy of that calendar of East Portland campsites we noted earlier. (“I think that we are used to having solutions to problems and we’re trained in really specific ways to have really specific solutions to really specific problems,” says firefighter Brett Zimmerman, “and I think when we show up and we don’t have a fix for something and we show up at camps and you can see folks that are struggling right in front of your eyes and you can see folks in hard spaces, and there’s no easy fix in that moment that we’ve been trained to give. That can be heavy and that can be frustrating because we want to help and we want to solve things. And I think that frustration can make you feel pretty helpless, and there’s positive ways to deal with that, and there’s less positive ways. Humor can be both.”)
Which side are you on, folks? Which side are you on?
“Which flavor of authoritarian oligarch would you prefer? The one who is bloodthirsty and vulgar about hating Muslims, or the one who is more polite and technocratic about it? The salivating, rabid racist, or the cool, self-congratulating one? The one who thinks he could get away with shooting someone on 5th Avenue, or the one whose personal “army” actually did after killing Sean Bell at 94th Avenue in Queens? The 73-year old man who measures his dick, or the 78-year old one who thinks the answer is to measure his head? The transgressive, sybaritic daddy who wants you to enjoy all the cheeseburgers you can, or the austere, martinet patriarch who will measure and ration your soda by the calories and ounce? The anal-sadistic pervert who is fixated on how toilets flush, or the anal-retentive one who obsesses over how long employees take to shit? Do you identify more with the retiree who is frustrated with their new, energy efficient appliances, or the still-hard-at-work tycoon who is furious at the inefficiency of his human employees? The lecher who’s fixated on pussy and tits, or the one who prefers mouths and ass?” —Patrick Blanchfield
In much the same way bricks don't.
Let Charles Mudede walk you through a Reddit post about the shuttering of a cinephile palace and how it’s just like what happened at Boeing, and it’s a cliché, I know, to say we don’t make stuff anymore, just money, but nowadays we don’t even do that; we can’t even be bothered to make up the numbers that make the right-colored bar climb in the right direction on a PowerPoint slide. We just make the money stand still in a pool somewhere long enough for a grifter to nip in and slip off with it, and what do you call your act? —The Capitalists!
Scenes from the always-emerging class struggle.
Friends and strangers send me links to Instagram ads, portholes into identically extravagant offices. The waiting rooms are plush mid-century modern, the exam rooms an assortment of delicate monochromes washed in halos of light. There is usually a jungle of plants somewhere in the frame. This week, it was Tend, the dentist’s office that is miraculously also a “studio” and a “dental wellness brand,” where patients brush with Italian Amarelli licorice toothpaste and arrive to find their favorite HBO dramas pre-loaded on a screen. For its expansion it brought in $36 million late last year. A few months ago it was Parsley Health, the functional medicine startup that operates outside the indignities of the insurance system. “Primary care is broken,” according to its founder, and the solution, as rendered by Parsley, is a whole-body approach that includes microbiome and genetics testing. (Supplements, rather than medications, are encouraged but not typically included in the membership fee.)
For those who desire a more overt technological flex in their healthcare journey, there is Forward, another subscription-model primary care doctor where membership grants access to a whole-body biometric scanner and patients view an interactive double of their body during visits. Women have Tia, the members-only gynecologist, or Maven, the virtual prenatal clinic that proudly labels itself “insurance free,” or any of the plush fertility startups Wall Street salivates over as they gaze at market predictions that curve steeply North. At the outer limits, there is the baffling monolith The Well, a private “wellness club” with a dizzying array of offerings within its white-washed walls, including Chinese medicine, energy healing, and $850 consultations with a licensed MD.
Most of these places are trying to replicate, or at least latch on to, the massive success of One Medical, a membership-based primary care franchise that operates nearly 80 locations and went public last week with a valuation of over $1.5 billion, a modest sum given its projected success. Unlike similar startups treating local populations or Medicare patients, One Medical has become the industry’s blueprint, a fantastically valuable company that can also say it is “fixing” healthcare with a straight face. (Scooping up the segment of a $3.5 trillion industry that has decent insurance and extra cash lying around is generally understood to be lucrative as hell.)
There are five signs that foreshadow the death of a god. His body’s inherent brilliance, usually visible from a league or several miles distant, grows dim. His throne, upon which he never before felt weary of sitting, no longer pleases him; he feels uncomfortable and ill at ease. His flower garlands, which before had never faded however much time passed, wither. His garments, which always stayed clean and fresh however long he wore them, get old and filthy and start to smell. His body, which never perspired at all before, starts to sweat. When these five signs of approaching death appear, the god is tormented by the knowledge that he, too, is soon going to die. His divine companions and sweethearts also know what is going to happen to him; they can no longer approach, but throw flowers from a distance and call their good wishes, saying, “When you die and pass on from here, may you be reborn among the humans. May you do good works and be reborn among the gods again.” With that they abandon him. Utterly alone, the dying god is engulfed by sorrow. With his divine eye he looks where he is going to be reborn. If it is in a realm of suffering, thetorments of his fall overwhelm him even before those of his transmigration have ended. As these agonies become twice and then three times as intense, he despairs and is forced to spend seven gods’ days lamenting. Seven days among the gods of the Heaven of the Thirty-three are seven hundred human years. During that time, as he looks back, remembering all the well-being and happiness he has enjoyed and realizing that he is powerless to stay, he experiences the suffering of transmigration; and looking ahead, already tormented by the vision of his future birthplace, he experiences the suffering of his fall. The mental anguish of this double suffering is worse than that of the hells.
Then the tests came quicker and more frequently. One in four jobs had an assessment attached, he estimates. He got emails prompting him to take an online test seconds after he submitted an application, a sure sign no human had reviewed his résumé. Some were repeats of tests he’d already taken.
He found them demeaning. “You’re kind of being a jackass by making me prove, repeatedly, that I can type when I have two writing-heavy advanced degrees,” Johnson said, “and you are not willing to even have someone at your firm look at my résumé to see that.”
Johnson also did phone interviews with an Alexa-like automated system. For one job, he was asked to make a one-sided video “interview” of himself answering a list of company-provided questions into a webcam for hiring managers to view at their convenience. Or maybe an algorithm would scan the video and give him a score based on vocal and facial cues, as more than 100 employers are now doing with software from companies like HireVue.
This central class divide now runs directly through the middle of most parties on the left. Like the Democrats in the US, Labour incorporates both the teachers and the school administrators, both the nurses and their managers. It makes becoming the spokespeople for the revolt of the caring classes extraordinarily difficult.
An especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.
“There may be some Democrats who think, ‘That’s exactly what we need to do, Rush. Get a gay guy kissing his husband on stage! You ram it down Trump’s throat and beat him in the general election.’ (laughing) Really? Having fun envisioning that.” —Say what you will, but vulgar Freudianism is oftentimes painfully correct. We’ll leave you with the time Letterman spat in Limbaugh’s coffee, for all the good that did the world.
You didn’t, Rusty.
“Chip-polt-lay? Say it with one voice. —It’s spelled c-h-i-p-o-t-l-e. Chip-polt-lay, that’s it? You’re telling me it’s Ship-pole-tay? Well, I’m gonna call it Chip-pote-il because I’ve never heard the word pronounced that way, and it doesn’t matter! —Chip-polt-ay? Okay, I’m gonna read the paragraph again ’cause you have distracted everybody now from the point. This is, aw, jeez! This is a piece written by an intellectual, pseudo-intellectual, attempting to explain why Obama was right when he said: ‘You didn’t build that’.” —a recent Medal of Freedom recipient
Aviso de inspección de equipaje.
US Customs and Border Protection destroyed Ballaké Sissoko’s irreplaceable kora on the way out of the country, just because they could, why not. —Somehow, when they told us all the world was getting smaller, I don’t think this was what anyone had in mind. CBP delenda est; TSA delenda est; ICE delenda est; DHS delenda est: delenda, delenda, delenda est, unto the seventh generation.
It’s funny,
but none of the folks who insist that affirmative action degrades both accomplishment and accomplisher seem to mind that Rush “who the hell cares” Limbaugh is only getting a Medal of Freedom to pwn the libs.
Fake news.
So I had this whole riff on how the controversy (?) over how it turns out James Corden’s Range Rover is being towed whenever they film those Carpool Karaokes (!), on how that’s what happens when the news is filled with Republicans pissing on your leg and telling you it’s raining people telling violently bald-faced lies without even caring whether they’re believed, and it’s overwhelming everything that you and everyone you know and love knows to be true, and there’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t call those people out, you can’t touch them, you can’t even spit in their coffee, and changing the channel does no good at all anymore, it’s in the air, it’s on your phone, it covers you now like some sort of film, in your hair, your face, like a glaze, a coating, a patina of shit, I mean, and voting doesn’t do any God damn good, and even if you are a Republican openly affect to agree with them this constant grinding degrading cognitive dissonance is going to take a toll, is going to build up pressure that has to be relieved somewhere, somehow (to get hydraulic for a moment), is going to squirt out at the oddest moment, lashing when it sees a chance to feel weirdly betrayed by a cheaply obvious bit of televisual trickery, I mean, who out there is really all that invested in the belief that actors must really be driving when they’re playing at driving a car? (James Garner as always excepted, of course.) —I had this whole riff, but it turns out it’s really just that James Corden’s actually kinda a dick, and people don’t like him. So.
Unfinished Business.
“Rather than rehearsing nineteenth-century reform as a history of bourgeois abolitionists having tea and organizing anti-slavery bazaars for their friends, Jackson offers electrifying accounts of Boston freedom fighters locking down courthouses and brawling with the police. We learn of preachers concealing guns in crates of Bibles and sending them off to abolitionists battling the expansion of slavery in the Midwest. We glimpse nominally free black communities forming secret mutual aid networks and arming themselves in preparation for a coming confrontation with the state. And we find that antebellum activists were also free lovers who experimented with unconventional and queer relationships while fighting against the institution of marriage and gendered subjugation. Traversing the nineteenth-century history of countless ‘strikes, raids, rallies, boycotts, secret councils, [and] hidden weapons,’ American Radicals is a study of highly organized attempts to bring down a racist, heteropatriarchal settler state—and of winning, for a time.” —Britt Rusert
