I don’t argue with people John Brown would’ve shot

I recently came across the Reddit community /r/ShermanPosting, dedicated to sharing hastily-made visual jokes (“shitposting”) insulting the Confederacy. Most were predictably terrible but I did spot his gem:

I don’t remember if we learned much about John Brown in high school. I really don’t. I remember a textbook glossing over the failure of Reconstruction. And I remember another that didn’t quite gloss it over so much, but also didn’t go into a ton of detail. American History classes tended to focus a lot on wars. But I don’t know when I learned about John Brown. I definitely remember learning the Battle Hymn of the Republic in elementary music class, but we definitely didn’t learn what it was originally about, any more than we learned the context of other songs we sang, like “Pick a Bale of Cotton” and “Jimmy Cracked Corn.”

(Nothing says “awkward memory” quite like recalling that you and your almost-exclusively-white classmates routinely sang a song about slaves picking cotton with an enthusiastic “oh lordy” in the chorus. Was it worse that there were in fact a handful of Black kids in the class who probably did know what it was about, and sang along with us anyway, because that’s what you do, go along with the other kids and the teacher, just like I bowed my head in Wednesday morning chapel service and mumbled the prayers that everyone else seemed to automatically know? I can’t tell. I don’t remember. Probably.)

Injustice System

NY cops have a longstanding system of “get out of crime free” cards for their friends & family.

This is what they do to people who don’t have those cards.

This is how they treat other people they like, right before those people drive their police-car-looking civilian car into a crowd.

They also have a long tradition of issuing commemorative “challenge coins,” gaudy unofficial medals that commemorate things that the NPYD officials then have to claim were definitely fine and normal, like police riots, making racist jokes about hunting Rastas in “Fort Jah” or just generally finding brutality and discrimination fucking hilarious.

Here’s one made by a group of New York’s finest to celebrate discovering that a fellow officer had taped discussions of their crimes and was going to report them, so they had him locked up in a mental hospital. It features a rat in a straitjacket. Get it? Hahahaha. Just to celebrate our participation in a crime and its subsequent coverup. You know. For fun.

The Internet Archive has a downloadable 42MB PDF of them. Some are innocuous. Others joke that people with substance abuse problems are zombies who need to be shot in the head. Good times.

Meanwhile, in some untidy spot:

And for good measure:

In 2015, Kenosha cop Pablo Torres shot and killed a man armed with a bucket. It was his first day back after another shooting 10 days earlier. He had a 200-page disciplinary file, with 9 excessive force complaints. The Kenosha police union paid tribute to him with this billboard. pic.twitter.com/2OBGqoD1Zz

Radley Balko (@radleybalko) September 2, 2020

Amusing Internet Ephemera

And Molly Hodgdon:

Some days you’re the unsuspecting archeologist, some days you’re the ancient evil.

Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) August 31, 2020

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