having the power of one Gillette

It's common enough that young black kids are told to keep any identifying information on them at all times just in case someone reports a black kid breaking and entering by walking into the house they've lived at since they were born. Because that has happened.

When you add mental illness and the healthcare industry into the mix, things only get worse from there. To be clear, you don't need to be black or mentally ill to be treated poorly by a doctor or nurse that's decided they know you better than you do. But it sure doesn't make things easier.

And people have died as a result- or have we already forgotten the death of Adriana Smith who went to THE HOSPITAL SHE WORKED AT AS A NURSE reporting severe headaches and was dismissed as exaggerating and imagining the severity, only to be declared brain dead upon arrival less than 24 hours later and artificially kept alive to force her dead body to carry her baby to term- which couldn't even happen and they had to remove him via C-section anyway.

Feed your friends. Feed your loved ones. Feed the people who help you. Feed your neighbors. Feed your community.

Here's how it works:

Someone starts a fire at an army draft office.

The cops look through their files for anyone who might be in the political orbit of someone who'd want to do that. People picked up at protests, for drug charges, vandalism, anyone who is already on their radar. They look into their known associates, anyone they live with, anyone they drink with.

Then they start subpoenaing these people for a grand jury summons. They give you immunity (but only for the matter of the grand jury!) so that you can't exercise the fifth amendment against self incrimination. If you say nothing, they can imprison you almost indefinitely for contempt of court. If they catch you in a lie, that's criminal perjury.

They'll ask you for information on everyone you know. Obviously they'll ask about their involvement in any crimes, but they're casting a wide net. Who knows who, where do they hang out, who talked to who about what and when. They'll ask you to spill interpersonal stuff, whether anyone is cheating on someone, whether people have substance abuse problems or embarrassing personal issues, if anyone is closeted, anything they consider dirt. Anyone you name is gonna get subpoenaed and they'll be asked for all this information on everyone they know, including you, and although you have immunity from your own testimony, you don't get immunity from each others.

Assuming you didn't personally do anything they can prosecute you for in the matter of the grand jury, they'll go after you based on what they know. The cops will arrest you on any little thing they have suspicion of, even if they know they can't prosecute you, just so that they can keep you in jail for a few days while you miss two shifts at work and your friends have to scramble to raise bail. They'll leak any embarrassing info that comes out, to your boss or your family or even the local press. Whatever they can do to make your life a little harder.

They will lean fucking hard on anyone who is involved in the scene but had second thoughts or felt like they were dragged into something they never wanted to do in the first place by their friends. The cops will say 'do you want to get your life ruined by people who did something stupid over something you barely even believe in' and sometimes that's a very compelling argument! If people have dependents or kids who they think won't be looked after if they go to prison, there's a lot of pressure to cooperate.

It's important to note two things:

1) Based on the ratio of actual prison sentences to maximum possible sentences for the charges, it's better for people not to cooperate with the jury both individually and as a group. People who talk still get sentenced, with the information they helped provide.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal just published a case report of the first locally acquired case of rabies in Ontario since the 1920s, and it sounds like the family didn’t realize that since he didn’t have an obvious bite, he still needed the vaccine. It’s an absolutely tragic story.

soliloquy by an immortal cave painter.

When I was studying at BeiDa literally only people whose families were from Beijing knew that “something” had happened at Tiananmen.

You know what you get when you search for “the June Fourth Incident” (aka the Tiananmen Massacre) on the Chinese internet?

You get this:

The entirety of Weibo. 600 million active users. And there is nothing.

On Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, you get a jumble of random unrelated crap:

(The scene with blood is a photo from a Baghdad market.)

Literally nowhere can you find this image:

To even show my roommates this picture, I had to get a VPN to get through the Great Firewall of China. And one of them frankly told me she was pretty sure it was Western propaganda hoax and that the event had not occurred.

And it happened at Tiananmen fucking Square! That is the stage for political symbolism! Imagine if the U.S. government used Black Hawk helicopters to kill hundreds of protestors who’d been inside the torch of the Statue of Liberty and Americans couldn’t even google it. And the consequences have been with China ever since. Not just the politics, but even the physical space: they put you through TSA-level security now before you can even step out onto the Square because they need to control speech acts on that symbolic stage.

The protestors wanted freedom of speech. And even the fact that they spoke up has been obliterated from history.

By contrast, the American government lets you google every single one of those American incidents. I have heard Neil Young’s “Ohio” at the fucking grocery store. We are all here talking about these events! We don’t even need to come up with coded alternatives!

Tiananmen should be remembered as a reference point of state violence. The subsequent blackout censorship is a direct result of the threat of state violence backed up with tanks. Until people are afraid to mention Ferguson on social media for fear of getting harmonised, I don’t see why we need to belittle the heroism of Chinese students and workers by making false comparisons.