Fans rally around Crazy Fred’s, a comic book store in the San Diego suburb La Mesa (where I live), which was looted in riots this weekend. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca…
I shop in the Von’s supermarket in the same shopping center as Crazy Fred’s. I had forgotten the comic store was there.
To be honest, it’s not that hard to protest. It’s not that hard to go someplace. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It doesn’t mean that it’s not critical. But that’s not the hard thing we need from people who care about these issues. We need people to vote, we need people to engage in policy reform and political reform, we need people to not tolerate the rhetoric of fear and anger that so many of our elected officials use to sustain power.
I’m trying to understand why wearing a mask — which is meant only to protect the most vulnerable among us and slow the spread of the virus to everyone else — has become the political equivalent of wearing a bumper sticker on your face. It makes me weep to think about it: Our one ready-to-hand tool for getting this country back to normal as quickly and as safely as possible has become yet another symbol of the seemingly insurmountable schism between Americans. It’s enough to break a true patriot’s heart.
Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic pluralistic.net/2020/06/0…
Trump’s bailout czar, Justin Muzinich, responsible for trillions in bailout money, is getting rich sucking on the public tit. Democrats and Republicans alike love Muzinich because he talks like a grownup but doesn’t let that get in the way of thievery.
===
Big data shows which policies reduce police brutality: Training and bodycams don’t work. What does work? Demilitarizing police equipment, and predictive policing to identify abusive cops:
… the overall message is just commonsense. Tell cops they’re not allowed to use violence. Don’t outfit them like an army.. Punish and fire cops who break the rules.
===
“Broken windows” crimefighting policies are the new Jim Crow, unfairly targeting black people.
Matt Taibbi: “We have two systems of enforcement in America, a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one for everyone else.”
Cory:
This is why NYC had to pay $33,000,000 in restitution for one hundred thousand strip-searches performed on people facing misdemeanor charges. These searches don’t merely reflect sadism – they’re also a way of creating new charges, like “resisting arrest.” It’s a twofer.
It’s why cops – correctly – came to understand that the people they were policing hated them and saw them as an occupying army.
Lucky for them, that was around the time military contractors successfully lobbied for a program of low-cost “surplus” sales of military equipment to local law.
That’s when we started to see cops dressing up like infantry on patrol in Mosul. “Dress for the job you want.”
Broken windows was a fraud, and “community policing” (the euphemism for stop-and-frisk) never worked. But it lumbers on as a zombie “fact” whose research was long discredited, claiming Black lives in its wake.
Old Yellow Stain declared himself a friend to peaceful protesters, and then ordered in flash bang explosions and tear gas to disperse peaceful, lawful protesters so he could get a photo op in front of a church, waving a Bible.
I’m just a nonobservant Jew but I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t say anything about flash bang explosions and tear gas. Correct me if I’m wrong?
“He did not pray,” said Mariann E. Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington. “He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years.”
He quotes AOC: “If you’re calling for an end to unrest, but not calling out police brutality, not calling for health care as a human right, not calling for an end to housing discrimination, all you’re asking for is the continuation of quiet oppression.”
In late 2001, after 9/11, I got in the habit of having my clock radio set to an all-news station to wake me up in the morning.
If the first words I heard were “Michael Jackson,” I knew there was no big news that morning. I could just shut off the radio. I didn’t have to rush to the Internet to find out what blew up. I could just get on with my wake-up routine.
There have been far too few Michael Jackson days this year..
While cowering in a bunker and doing nothing, President Tweetie demands other people get tough. www.cnn.com/2020/06/0…
@dave Winer compares Trump to Captain Queeg — Old Yellow Stain.
Hell yeah. Trump in the bunker with the White House lights off, muttering about the antifa – his stolen strawberries.
It’s like the scene at the end of The Stand, where Glen Bateman is in a prison cell, laughing about how foolish he feels to have been be afraid of Randal Flagg, who turned out to be just pathetic.
