Today’s post is about genocide, with a bonus set of links to important articles about economic crisis, climate crisis, and voter suppression. There’s also some nonhorrible stuff in it, like funny Tweets and some very cute dogs, but mostly it’s very upsetting and you shouldn’t read it:
I keep opening this draft and trying to write something nice. I really do. I keep failing. I have written and deleted lengthy paragraphs full of horrific news. But you know all of them. The west coast is on fire. The ocean is teeming with cyclones. The president is openly calling for armed vigilante violence against his opponents.
And there are some very serious allegations about some truly horrific stuff going down in Georgia. The Intercept, The Guardian, and other sources are covering a whistleblower’s report that an ICE detention center is forcing sterilizations on detained women.
I first saw it blowing up on Twitter with links to a blog I’d never heard of before. I didn’t want to share it – it had all the hallmarks of a moral panic – it’s an outrage, and sterilizing the ‘undesirable’ is something we’ve got a LONG history of doing in this country, and yet… also it seemed too horrible to be true.
Excess surgeries? In a shoestring-budget detention center, in a medical system that’s so expensive? In a region where so many hospitals are Catholic that it’s hard for a patient to get a hysterectomy when she actually wants and needs one? That’s like jumping from the knowledge that child abuse exists straight to the 1980s Satanic Panic, isn’t it?
But of course, if a someone can bill for it and be sure they’ll get paid, that’s an incentive.
As more publications have picked it up, the story has gotten more attention and more fact-checking. The whistleblower is no longer anonymous, and the doctor in question seems to have been been identified as one previously involved in a Medicaid/Medicare billing scam that led to a $500,000+ settlement.
It seems like a uniquely late-capitalist American horror. Not for us the totalitarian order to reduce the Uighur population in Xinjiang, but a distributed series of financial incentives that are less widespread and easier to disclaim. Stochastic genocide, if you will: given the way we’ve set up the interlocking shitshows of immigration policy, racism, and health care billing, it was inevitable, even if we couldn’t predict exactly when and where.
Good News for People Who Love Bad News
Here are three items I think are especially important. I left out the bit about the swarms of mosquitoes large enough to kill livestock.
- WaPo: A pandemic, a motel without power, and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future.
- ProPublica: Climate change will force a new American migration.
- Slate: Not only can Florida force people to pay a tax before voting, but the state doesn’t have to tell them how much to pay.
Bonus rage: a thing about cops in LA beating a journalist and lying about it.
If you want to do something, here’s a list of places where your political donation dollar will make the most difference.
Good Tweets (Some Funny, Some Thoughtful)
Man, that Dune trailer was so great I felt like I was the one walking through a desolate landscape, wearing a mask to stay alive, while political machinations that threaten the planet are at work in the background of my life.
Nick Disband the Police Mamatas 🤼♂️🏴 (@NMamatas) September 9, 2020
- Watching the neighbor kid try to hide a dent in his mom’s car.
- Civil War Generals as Muppets. A definitive ranking.
- Baaaaad Science shows us new life forms of the deep ocean.
- Breaking down a digital pregnancy test to reveal that it’s identical to the analog tests, but with a tiny camera and processor to interpret the lines.
- Commercials for increasingly dire situations (“Injured by police at a peaceful protest? Advil has your back…”)
- Jeet Heer’s thoughts on Raymond Chandler.
Cultivating Joy
Octopus eggs.
Bananacat.
This nose with a dog attached to it.
This dog working from home.
Pretty sure this dog’s name is Spot.
Dog learns to use a slide at a playground.
Secretly Ironic 