A red-letter day, marked in red on a calendar, is an important day. A black letter day, then, must be an ordinary day, an unimportant one. There are several recent-ish songs about it, notably by The Cardigans (“Black letter day, all the joy has gone away”) and Frank Black and the Catholics (“When the morning breaks, I wake and see it’s just another long black letter day”).
Those songs came to mind immediately when I saw this article in Wired about work-from-home fatigue sapping our ability to concentrate, focus, or create:
Every day is the same as the next, they say: stuck at home, which is also work, and failing miserably at being productive. They are experiencing a neurological phenomenon, chronic low-grade stress, which was triggered by the coronavirus lockdown, and has sent our bodies into overdrive and is wearing down creativity and concentration.
Vox of course is here with an explainer of the history and future of videochat.
Normal Activities
BLM protests have faded from the headlines, but in Portland, Oregon, unidentified paramilitary forces brought in by the federal government have been snatching protestors off the street for no apparent reason. I was skeptical of that statement at first, because I saw it from Twitter leftists rather than from reputable news sources. But it’s been picked up by Oregon Public Broadcasting and other major news sources.
What’s interesting is that not only is it unclear which of various federal security forces they belong to, but that state and local authorities have asked the feds to cut it out.
The other interesting thing is that the Department of Homeland Security states that these paramilitaries are necessary to stop “violence” which seems to be defined mostly as… graffiti and vandalism.
Anyway, the mayor wants them out, the governor wants them out, they have no actual justification to be there, and they’re still just sort of out there. The Washington Post describes the cracking of skulls:
The protester, armed only with a speaker, stood across the street from a line of officers clad in body armor in downtown Portland, Ore., on Saturday night. When they threw a canister his way, video shows, the protester calmly rolled it away. Seconds later, shots rang out, and he crumbled to the ground with blood gushing from his head.
Mr. Pettibone said he was terrified and that at no point was he told why he was arrested or detained, or what agency the officers were with.
US Marshalls denied that Mr. Pettibone had been detained. (I repeat: a man was briefly kidnapped by an unidentified paramilitary force and officials deny that it happened).
Duke Sociology professor Kieran Healy notes:
Quite honestly, if the country gets used to this sort of thing as a normal event that can happen to the wrong people, you’re one and a half steps away from people being thrown out of helicopters and into the sea. https://t.co/bIfTV0H4R2
Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) July 17, 2020
He’s not joking, nor are the fascist memelords hoping to give “free helicopter rides” to “globalists” (i.e. Jews) and liberals.
Interestingly, the cops are entirely focused on left-wing violence, despite obvious and clear indications that right-wingers have been instigating a great deal of it.
“Throughout the documents you see counterterrorism agencies using extremism so broadly as to mean virtually anything that encompasses dissent,” Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Intercept. “There are instances in which people engaging in white supremacist violence get the benefit of the doubt as potential lone offenders, while people of color and those who dissent against government injustice are smeared as threats with guilt by association.”
We’re just out here having a normal one, but now it’s on video and harder to ignore. But we’re still ignoring it as best we can. Studiously. Resolutely.
Look harder. The Times has a compilation of NYPD attacks on civilians, but that’s just the ones that the Times deems important and New-York-Centric enough to highlight. There’s a Google doc of crowdsourced horror here. If you’re not yet nauseous, try scrolling through the Reddit board /r/2020PoliceBrutality, featuring such gems as “LAPD beats man in wheelchair.”
Cultivating Joy
You must be kidding. It’s just another long black letter day.
Secretly Ironic 