Category: Words

Hints and Allegations

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.

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

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.

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

Some of those who work forces

Even if you’re not a fan of the music, you might recognize the lyrics from Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing In the Name Of” — “Some of those that work forces, are the ones who burn crosses.” The song was written following the 1992 brutalization of Rodney King by the LAPD, and it comes up every time a cop is revealed to be a white supremacist (or occasionally when a longtime fan finally pays attention to the lyrics and is outraged he’s been listening to leftist rock).

Which is to say, it comes up all the goddamn time.

Police and right-wing government officials in Oregon have a longstanding friendly relationship with right-wing militias (see news from June 2017, June 2019, June 2020 and August 2020) but have recently completely given up on trying to enforce any semblance of law on them – enforcement is reserved for people who want cops to stop murdering people.

And of course, then there’s Kenosha, WI, where police shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times, prompting protests and forcing the AP Stylebook to issue a reminder about how to properly report on police violence:

Avoid the vague “officer-involved” for shootings and other cases involving police. Be specific about what happened. If police use the term, ask: How was the officer or officers involved? Who did the shooting? If the information is not available or not provided, spell that out. — APStylebook (@APStylebook) August 25, 2020

That subtweet didn’t do much, since CBS and other mainstream outlets went on to report that the protests “turned violent,” as though they hadn’t begun with a man getting shot in the back seven times while his children watched.

And of course, because it’s 2020 and because this is how everything goes now, things took a turn for the worse when a white kid who just loves cops showed up with a rifle. Videos from the evening show police chatting with armed militia groups and sharing water with them, and praising them for showing up. Then the kid (allegedly) murdered two people and walked away, and cops let him walk past. He has since been charged with murder, but gosh, how did they not fear for their lives and shoot him in the back seven times?

The chief of police described the incident with a perfect example of the past exonerative tense: “an individual … was involved in the use of firearms to resolve whatever conflict was in place.”

Kenosha had previously reformed its police internal affairs procedures in response to a fatal shooting in 2004. At the time, the New York Times heralded this development as a way to improve trust in law enforcement.

Reader, it did not.

See Also

Cultivating Joy

Stop doomscrolling, it’s all collected here already

Longread on climate refugees from ProPublica.

Texas braces for climate-change-fueled “megadrought.”

Caution, graphic: This is what happens to your face when the border patrol decides to play riot squad.

Officials denied using tear gas to clear protestors from Lafayette Park for the president’s bible photo op. That was a lie, of course.


Not that things haven’t been terrible for a long time. The Onion, as always, is almost too perfect with the headline “Defensive Chicago Police Officer Perfectly Capable Of Disappearing Protestors Without Help From Homeland Security.” That’s barely a joke, given that Chicago PD got caught operating literal black sites back in ’15. And it’s not just Chicago: 

During grad school I was literally picked up off the street in Harlem by plain clothed police officers who didn’t show me a badge, put me in the back of unmarked van, parked in a single spot for like an hour as I sat in van. Thought I had been kid napped. They been doing this.

Matthew D. Morrison (@DrMaDMo) July 29, 2020

This article on how police unions fight reform pairs well with this article about the Springfield, MA police force, where officers receive no discipline despite verified allegations of criminally abusive behavior and substantial city liability payouts.

And there’s this, whatever the hell this pointlessly cruel self-destructive behavior is. And:

This is going to sound like an exaggeration but it is literally true that instead of funding testing and food and rent and schools and preventing layoffs and evictions republicans proposed a full write-off for the three martini lunch and more money for the F-35.

Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) July 28, 2020

And of course there’s that genocide in China right now – The Atlantic has excellent coverage of just how extreme the surveillance and control in Xinjiang are, and illustrates the growing threat that they will be expanded.

Which leads us to the question: what if these are the good old days?

Cultivating Joy

Be sure to look at all the photos in this Instagram post of a floofy dog on a glass table.

Of course you need another photo of Fig the dachsund.

And these ducklings.

And this kitten.

Just Another Long Black Letter Day

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.

The Times is on it as well:

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.

Daily Doomscroll

Ever find yourself unable to look away from the horrors of the news cycle? The term of art these days is “doomscrolling” and it’s a bad habit. Our president is a huge fan of war crimes. He’s in a hole and just keeps digging. Oh look, a profile of those gun-waving jerkasses in St. Louis — perhaps unsurprisingly, they have a history of being jerkasses. Hey, the brain drain caused by immigration restrictionism is really kicking into high gear.

OK, here’s one optimistic take — Maeve Higgins writes about living in the US for the Irish Examiner.

Longer reads

Foreign Affairs has twin articles this month titled “How a Great Power Falls Apart” and “How Hegemony Ends.” The first begins with a short summary of the work of underappreciated Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik and his insights into how impending collapse is invisible from the inside. The second is a rather more conventional geopolitical analysis:

Today, those same dynamics have turned against the United States: a vicious cycle that erodes U.S. power has replaced the virtuous cycles that once reinforced it. With the rise of great powers such as China and Russia, autocratic and illiberal projects rival the U.S.-led liberal international system. Developing countries—and even many developed ones—can seek alternative patrons rather than remain dependent on Western largess and support. And illiberal, often right-wing transnational networks are pressing against the norms and pieties of the liberal international order that once seemed so implacable. In short, U.S. global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unraveling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.

The New York Review of Books is excellent on the topic of fascism’s resurgence here:

As militarized police in riot gear and armored vehicles barreled into peaceful protesters in cities across America, and its president emerged from a bunker to have citizens tear-gassed on his way to a church he’d never attended, holding a Bible he’d never read, many people recalled a famous saying often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Because Lewis’s novel is the best remembered of the many warnings against American fascism in the interwar years, he has latterly been credited with the admonition, but they are not Lewis’s words.

Interview speaks with Jia Tolentino:

INTERVIEW: What has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society?

TOLENTINO: That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we’re incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself; that most of us hold more unknown potential, more negative capability, than we’re accustomed to accessing; that the material conditions of life in America are constructed and maintained by those best set up to exploit them; and that the way we live is not inevitable at all.

Cultivating Joy
Gibbons fascinated by hedgehogs
This dog doesn’t look real
This cat hasn’t quite got the hang of being a cat yet
This dog floating in a pool
Blep

Like a Rider on a Downbound Train

When the pandemic began, every email marketer was sending out an announcement about their upgraded cleanliness policies to their full list, even the unengaged contacts, and it got to be almost funny that every company I ever did business with ever was sending me pandemic-related something. I mean, seriously, eVacuumStore.com, I do not need to hear from you about this. I order vacuum bags from you once a year.

And the language just got to be almost rote, everyone borrowing from each other. And I began to wonder what phrase would still resonate later — what would be the title of the definitive memoir of the plague years.

Would it be “Out of an Abundance of Caution” or “These Uncertain Times?”

And now, we can say that it’s definitely going to be “These Uncertain Times.”

Just watch this ad from notoriously rude Chicago hot-dog stand The Weiner’s Circle, which begins with “In these uncertain times” and ends with “fuck you Corona, you sound like the name of a sneaky-ass bitch.”

Music for These Uncertain Times

For whatever reason, I never got into Bruce Springsteen. Did I just miss the age for The Boss appreciation? I’m not sure. But I’ve seen folks online joking that he’s the man for These Uncertain Times because his music is about being underemployed, alienated and horny. Anyway, I keep seeing the lyrics crop up in pop culture in odd places, like this juxtaposition of the lyrics to “Atlantic City” with Trump administration scandals.

Then NextDraft, recently my fave newsletter, did a whole issue with different news themed to different Springsteen songs, and one of them was Downbound Train, and when I looked it up on Spotify it offered me two versions – one by Springsteen, and a cover by Kurt Vile. That’s actually his name, no relation to Kurt Weill. Anyway, the cover’s pretty nice, give it a listen. I’ve had it on repeat for the past two days, because, well, don’t you feel like a rider on a downbound train?

News

Bloomberg: Coronavirus brings American decline out in the open

The U.S.’s decline started with little things that people got used to… They grumbled about high taxes and high health-insurance premiums and potholed roads, but rarely imagined what it would be like to live in a system that worked better….
The consequences of U.S. decline will far outlast coronavirus. With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S. will be a less appealing place for high-skilled workers to live. That means companies will find other countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere a more attractive destination for investment, robbing the U.S. of jobs, depressing wages and draining away the local spending that powers the service economy.

Vox: What day is it?

Time, at least as we understand it, is also a byproduct of capitalism… as industrialization became the norm, time became a mechanized system that no longer served those who’d invented it. We increasingly served at the beck and call of time, for that is how those who possessed capital could best regulate those who performed the labor.

Muckrake: Deadly Paranoia: White America has been radicalized and prepped for violence, starring the couple with the terrible trigger control brandishing firearms from the front porch of their palatial mansion.

The point is, none of this is new. What happened in St. Louis is only an exposure of what has long infected the body politic of the country come to the surface. It is the ugly reality of who we are and where we have been. Only now, in an era of twenty-four hours news, the internet, and conspiracy theory as a means of political strategy and financial profit, the infection grows worse and worse, not to mention potentially deadly, by the day.

Bonus STL Magazine: Profile of said mansion’s restoration.

Nieman Lab: It’s time to change the way we we report on protests

On May 31, WUSA, the Washington, D.C. CBS affiliate, tweeted, “Pepper spray caused a short stampede in Lafayette Park during a peaceful march honoring George Floyd” — suggesting that the pepper spray somehow acted of its own accord … So when Slate published a story with the headline “Police erupt in violence nationwide,” it was almost startling in its forthrightness.

Bonus: Slate article highlighting spreadsheet of police violence incidents.

Cultivating Joy

Very tiny dog

Taika Watiti holding Baby Yoda

Twitter tale about accidental wildlife cuddles

Dogs learn teamwork

Sound on for these tiny kittens meeting a big dog

Uber, But For the Moral Arc of the Universe

The fallacy of Whig historiography is the idea that history is a progression, has a story and a point, a destination. It’s not. People do things, and things are done to them. Maybe we learn from those events, maybe we don’t. Maybe we take away the wrong lessons. Maybe the real treasure is the friends we made along the way. Maybe the real treasure is a trillion-dollar coin.

A senator calls for the military to be deployed against American citizens based on an imaginary threat from an amorphous philosophy, and the New York Times deems this idea worthy of discussion. The senator is running unopposed.

Former US spies announce that they see the warning signs of dictatorship looming, and they’d know, they’ve helped install dictatorships before.

The leading challenger to the current regime thinks maybe it’d be OK if cops shot people in the leg instead of the face.

Perhaps we are at a tipping point. Maybe we make it tip toward good. Maybe we don’t.

People keep getting this wrong. Frankenstein is the doctor’s name. The monster is Mitch McConnell. https://t.co/IsVNJdW2ZX

Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) April 23, 2020

Other Newsletters In Case You Don’t Get Enough Email
Pome: Daily poem
Letters from an American: This specific American is a professor of history
Popular Information: Independent journalist Judd Legum calls people and organizations to account

Best of Twitter
Family lore discussion: This person’s Grandma had an affair with…. Don Knotts?

/r/relationships advice: Who among us has not had a violent feud with a Waffle House line cook?

Dave Pell switched to edibles.

Literary games of Twitter: Quote the first sentence of a book, then add “and then the dragons arrived.” In these sorts of challenges I always go with 100 Years of Solitude: “Many years later, facing the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to discover ice, and then the dragons arrived.”

Cultivating Joy
Komondor goes swimming
Muppet dog courtesy of /r/rarepuppers
Dogs working from home

Stay safe out there, friends.

Secretly Ironic: Trust me on this one

What could possibly go wrong? While we wait for the end of the world (if not The Virus, then perhaps The Asteroid? Perhaps The Spider?) let’s take a quick look at why we deserve it.

Injustice System
If you recall the cop-flag from a few weeks ago, I’ve come across several additional good stories about it. The first is a comic about the evolution of the paramilitary commando fascist aesthetic; the second a warning about police departments using sociopathic vigilante superhero The Punisher as a mascot; the third is either hilarious or terrifying or both: Meet Blue Lives Mickey, the Worst T-Shirt in the World.

You may think you know terrible t-shirts from such places as Atlantic City or The Internet, but trust me. This is the absolute worst.

The Climate
Just like Brexit created zillions of unanticipated stupid hassles, the climate crisis is doing the same thing. Like, who owns land that doesn’t exist anymore? Can you legally fish in newborn rivers that used to be someone’s back yard? And why do we keep buying bigger and bigger SUVs and trucks, to the point that they no longer fit into our garages? Are we hitting the era of Peak Car and cool/sad automotive infrastructure photography? Is it too late to make a difference?

The Zeitgeist
Trust me, Patricia Lockwood is always worth a read. In this case, she’s writing about the hivemind of the internet in the London Review of Books.

Also the Washington Post on racialized dialect in sign language.

The Conversation: Humans Aren’t Designed to Be Happy. Stop Trying. (If design govern in a thing so small…)

The Cesspool
Lawyers, Guns & Money on soft authoritarian thresholds.
US leaves international accord on preventing road deaths.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the Border Patrol has what amounts to a license to kill people on either side of the US/Mexico border with total impunity.
Tax breaks Jared lobbied for seem to have made him a huge amount of money for some reason.

Cultivating Joy
Dog & Owl Are Friends
Cat crams its face into a Pringles can
This kitten that seems very upset it hasn’t figure out how to move very well yet