and apologies for linking a cop website
https://www.chicagocop.com/history/memorials-monuments/haymarket-memorial-statue/
but the century long saga of cops having to move their dumbass haymarket statue into more and more secure locations because it kept getting defaced, knocked over, blown up etc is one of my favorite bits of local pride
I heavily respect the guts and heart it took to respond the way you did and share what you shared. Maybe, I'm a bit too taken with invective and provocation. So, at least, allow me to take full responsibility for you feeling defensive.
I do feel I could elaborate, just a little bit. By the brutality I feel is being sanctioned by the law, I don't just mean the killing, or even the forceful pinning, even for any length of time. I would say the brutality begins the moment the interaction begins in any way, it's a psychological brutalizing before it's a physical one. We don't even hear on a national/global level about all but the most egregious and extreme cases of brutality at this point. I think that's what I meant by that particularly spicy bit of invective. The law chose to punish the killing but the ruling isn't critical of the idea that Chauvin shouldn't have had a right to even law a finger on George Floyd at all.
I feel similar in a lot of ways with your 1,000,000 clones comment. Even as a prison and police abolitionist I'm not so naive as to think we won't need places to keep violent and dangerous people removed from the rest of us, even if I get my hands on a magic lamp and wish for the complete abolition of police and prisons overnight. I mean, we need a place to keep former cops and we need people to put them in there and keep them in there. The ones who end up getting it can even leave!
This is the coffee thread right?
Having a normal day. Triaging emails before my day of medium stress meetings. Observing the maple tree is now full of leaves and wet with last night’s rain.
And I got these NeoGeo Samurai Showdown marquees at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo when they last had it in 2019. I brought them home when I was cleaning my desk a year ago and they’ve just been kinda sitting next to me for the last year. They aren’t going to stay there long, but I felt it was pretty Insert Credit.
@Moon, thanks for your service! My grandfather was a career officer in the Coast Guard. We moved in the 90s and made some other good family friends who also happened to be tied to the Coast Guard. I hold the Cost Guard in extremely high esteem. They have a hard job, answer to too many bosses (DOD/DHS/JCOS in war???) and aren't properly recognized for their contribution.
Yesterday I voted to de-fund the cops by not approving a levy. After a year of watching the police with a very different perspective, the only line-items in the page-long list of things that was being funded I wanted was the body camera program, and the detectives who would be assigned to human trafficking cases. I didn't want the 80 beds and the 35 traffic cops. Felt good and felt different. These taxes usually pass no problem and I didn't even know it was up on the ballot but I'm going to be watching for them in the future and start talking them down to my friends and family.
@antillese Yes, it is. Been enjoying and improving my knowledge about coffee since then. Seemed like years had gone since January 2021!
After months of waiting, I‘m scared, but I’m moving into my new house. Very glad and lucky to be in a situation where I can enjoy having my own space and time to play. It's strange to live a very sweet time in such a glooming horizon (specially when you look at things globally and at people around me).
I feel similar in a lot of ways with your 1,000,000 clones comment.
If I was a cop I like to imagine I'd be like the cop from the movie Magnolia, the one who loses his gun and falls in love with strangers.
I've been reprising my Uni hobby of buying imported drinks from the asian supermarket around the corner. I bought a cool bottle of 7UP, it had been a long time since I saw Fido Dido. My most recent one is this:
I liked the design, I can‘t read much on it except for Sugar Free and Mojito Flavoured. It was quite good but I don’t think I will buy it again. I‘m not sure if I should ignore the bombings I see on twitter or try to accept I live in this world. I hate how powerless I am in a global scale. I try to think what I would do if I was in charge of this country and I think politics would stop me from anything I tried. There was a stabbing in a supermarket this week and it feels like old news already. I also bought some matcha latte sachets the other week, they’re easy and taste alright if I'm in the mood.
@beets if i may show off my chinese reading proficiency, i believe you have found yourself with some health-power-treasure finely swirled water.
my girlfriend has extended family in palestine including in gaza and so it's been a weird week. she's not particularly close with any of them individually so it's not a keep-us-up-at-night sort of worry, but still it's obviously an emotional drain. that's her home. we are attending a protest this weekend. not that i think it will change anything policy-wise (we are in canada), but i think it's something just to go outside and show someone out there that you care.
seems to me that palestine sympathy, shading into actually taking a pro-palestine position, is noticeably more mainstream during current events than I can recall it ever being. Also not sure what that will add up to, but it seems like more people aren't buying the IDF line anymore
that seems true online among younger people maybe, but then i watch the cbc (our national news network) and it‘s the most blatant both-sides bs, with the obligatory not mentioning palestine by name, following every “israel forces bombed gaza” with a “BUT hamas fired rockets too!”, treating it as if this is a war between sovereign states with political autonomy, etc etc… they literally had footage of an israeli guy who had a rocket land near his house, saying "it’s time to destroy gaza once and for all"… christ. tiring stuff, man. normally i wouldn't watch but we were curious… i mean i have pretty low expectations for major news networks but still. yowza.
Yeah this has been going on for quite some time, I think. When I started becoming politically aware, in the mid-00s, being pro-Israel was a mainstream position quite a bit into the center left here. These days it's a far right position, with liberals doing their both sides-spiel and everybody else really angry about this.
The cruelty going on there right now is very hard to defend unless you basically like seeing arabs die, though. Unfortunately there's a fairly significant chunk of Europe that does.
An interesting perspective / “take” : https://twitter.com/RaphMim/status/1392323061513297921
(click through, the thread is worth reading)
There‘s been some oddball/provocative marxist writing on the function of anti-colonial framework in Poland, which holds that it’s a reactionary rather than emancipatory ideology when rooted in I guess unintended material settings. So of course it‘s a legit line of critique in palestine, haiti, central africa, etc. but becomes this rationale to excuse reactionary thought, domination (and buying into the the NATO mil-industrial complex client state system). Poland, which does have a long history of occupation, disenfranchisement, mass death of civilian populations, etc., but has also done it’s fair share of bullying to regional smaller fish (+ its own Jewish population). And it‘s current right wing, pseudo-fascist political swing has been weirdly receptive to anti-colonial thinking because it’s another way to launder its own cultural chauvinism and anti-LGBT, anti-women policies, cozying up to the nastiest elements of the USA (CIA black sites, arms purchases, etc)
So to be clear, I'm absolutely not drawing a equivalence of suffering/persecution historically or presently b/t the polish Christian community and the Jewish community in Poland and elsewhere, or the legitimate material concerns that contributed to the establishment of Israel - just relaying some thinking about how a state can twist valid sympathies into becoming violent and oppressive itself while carrying these legitimate historical trauma (again, not suggesting that anti-semitism is in any way a thing of the past)
@yeso This is complicated territory! I guess in the case of central/eastern Europe in particular the fact that the occupiers people remember most vividly was Actually Existing Socialism makes it very vulnerable to these impulses. This is a tangent but the EU has definitely worsened the centre/periphery dynamic of Europe and it does things to countries that are, well, peripheral. I don‘t know to what extent it’s framed as colonialism in Polish (or Romanian, or Latvian, or Hungarian etc) discourse but the resentment is definitely there and is definitely fueling the far right.
Would you say there are similar impulses at play in the Middle East? A country like Iran is certainly painfully aware of colonialism, and the government knows how to use that rhetoric for legitimacy, yet there's certainly very little emancipatory about their politics.
Got out of bed to respond to an email and tell my boss I’m going back to bed because the 2nd COVID shot has flattened me. Sounds like a normal day.
Had some iced coffee. We make cold brew in a huge mason jar out of that San Francisco Coffee Company brand Costco sells. It’s too dark and bitter for pour-over, but it’s great after it’s been sitting on the counter for 48 hours and chilled in the fridge.
@christoffing I don’t know enough about the middle east to say if anti-colonialism has been misapplied elsewhere. I think using poland as an example to think through grievance-based ideology and how that takes a reactionary turn when misapplied might be useful in considering israel bc there’s so much justified concern re anti-semitism there that it is used by the IDF to justify colonial violence. Not so in poland. And the grievance politics in the polish historical memory have some legitimacy to them, whereas the white American grievance ideology has much less. And just to clarify re poland: the view is going back to the 17th century and occupations by prussia, Austria, Russia, Sweden, etc etc not just the soviets
re the upcoming chilean elections: the naruto-running lady (this is running around with floppy arms or something?) who is battling the communist party candidate for first in the polls, announced that she hasn‘t had sex with her husband (who is also running for office during this election cycle) for several years, but that she’ll fuck him on twitch if he wins his election. She also claims she‘s a sexy grandma. Sorry for the awkward sentence structure, not really sure how to relay this info. Saw it floating around a few sites and checked the primary sources for myself, this seems to be what’s actually happening.
**heads up if anyone googles these people, a few of the news articles about them have a big nude ass image embedded so not safe for work
this is the kind of news i'm interested in.
@yeso wow…where can i subscribe!!
