biology is not destiny

But something like "overpopulation is the problem" sounds right to someone who doesn't know how reactionary politics function. It seems like an obvious, indisputable fact when one doesn't learn how to untangle the deeper implications behind political statements. So a lot of (white) liberals are especially susceptible to the type of recruiting that cryptofascists prefer to employ.

My brother, who would be horrified to know the origins of his belief, thoroughly believes the overpopulation lie. He's a Terminally Online Zoomer opinionated white guy who is a perfect target for accelerationists: not at all likely to participate in their horrendous violence, but very likely to absorb the rhetoric that makes him feel paralyzed, apathetic, and misanthropic while they detonate the world around him.

If we care about stopping this tide of fascism, we are obligated to learn the ways in which they've camouflaged themselves. The term "dogwhistle" gets bandied about a lot, and applied to things like the (((three parentheses))), which has quickly moved from dog whistle to open, unabashed antisemitism. The actual dog whistles, the ones we need to be aware of and ready to critique, often sound on the surface like normal conversations.

________________________ This is what I’ve been talking about on here with regards to the anti-capitalist right.

Leftists (especially those who are not strongly involved in antifascist work) need to be very careful in anti-capitalist spaces, because there are multiple strands of fascist anti-capitalist movements that seek to destroy Western governments as a goal. There is a ‘revolutionary right’ and they absolutely will use Leftist action to their own benefit to take power and implement their own vision of society based in white cis male supremacy and eugenics.

Not everyone who is anti-US government or anti-capitalist or anti-centralized government is a comrade. Leftists need to forefront our fight against racism (esp anti-blackness), antisemitism, misogyny (esp transmisogyny), and eugenics. Our primary goal as leftists needs to be based in liberation movements and the inherent value of individuals’ life, freedom, and bodily autonomy.

Air Force officials are investigating after an A-10C Thunderbolt II fighter jet on a training mission accidentally fired a rocket near Tucson. Officials at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base say the M-156 rocket landed Thursday morning in a remote desert wash near Mount Graham.

In Fallujah, we also illegally used white phosphorus - this was to make the “enemy forces” move from their cover. Now PLEASE tell me how I’m supposed to believe that this was an accident? The military “accidently” loaded up weapons to their fighter jets that are banned by international law and “accidently” dropped one close to a border town and we’re supposed to believe nothing is going on? 

A municipal broadband service in Fort Collins, Colorado went live for new customers today, less than two years after the city’s voters approved the network despite a cable industry-led campaign against it.

“Finally, a broadband provider you can trust,” the city-run broadband service’s website says in a pointed message about the Comcast cable and CenturyLink DSL services that are the city’s primary broadband networks.

Fort Collins Connexion, the new fiber-to-the-home municipal option, costs $59.95 a month for 1Gbps download and 1Gbps upload speeds, with no data caps, contracts, or installation fees. There’s a $15 monthly add-on fee to cover Wi-Fi, but customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own router. Fort Collins Connexion also offers home phone service, and it plans to add TV service later on.

Connexion is only available in a small portion of the city right now.

“The initial number of homes we’re targeting this week is 20-30. We will notify new homes weekly, slowly ramping up in volume,” Connexion spokesperson Erin Shanley told Ars. While Connexion’s fiber lines currently pass just a small percentage of the city’s homes and businesses, Shanley said the city’s plan is to build out to the city limits within two or three years.

“Ideally we will capture more than 50% of the market share, similar to Longmont,” another Colorado city that built its own network, Shanley said. Beta testers at seven homes are already using the Fort Collins service, and the plan is to start notifying potential customers about service availability today.

The city reportedly issued $143 million in bonds to finance the city-wide network. Fort Collins has a population of 165,000.

Ballot question

In November 2017, voters in Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build the broadband network.

The Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA), of which Comcast is a member, donated $815,000 toward a campaign against the ballot initiative. The Chamber of Commerce also opposed the plan. Comcast didn’t participate in the campaign publicly, but the company would have been the main beneficiary of a vote against the municipal option.

In all, the industry-led opposition spent more than $900,000 fighting the ballot question, while the pro-broadband group led by residents spent about $15,000.

Before the election, a study by a pro-municipal broadband group estimated that “Competition in Fort Collins would cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year.”

I live in New Zealand, so I’ll contrast to here - because New Zealand is, for one thing, generally regarded as a benign little country in complete contrast to China’s international reputation, and because for another thing, New Zealand is categorically an imperialist power, albeit a shitty little one. 

New Zealand has two major facets to its international relations: one, it directly rules some territories in the Pacific as protectorates. Of these, Kiribati is non-self governing and is legislated by the New Zealand parliament; Niue and the Cook Islands are self-governing but are both economically dependent upon the New Zealand government and subject to our own foreign policy agenda. 

The other facet to New Zealand’s imperialist role is actually the more major one, our role as a financial hub in the Pacific. This means that for one thing, we flood the Pacific with cheap exports that make local economies impossible - you cannot produce and sell many products cheaper than New Zealand can in your own islands, so regional economies are utterly stunted in ways that benefit New Zealand. Secondly, we use our diplomatic strength to force the governments of these countries to maintain trade relations with us in a way that requires them to accept our terms. This lets us treat the Pacific as our backyard and dumping ground, keeping these small island economies as shock absorbers for our agricultural markets. 

In contrast, China neither directly rules any territories nor maintains satellites, colonies or semi-colonies. 

The government of the PRC is a series of nested committees, each accountable to the mass base of the population as well as the committees below it. Regions that have become cause celebres among western liberals due to concerns over human rights violations such as Xinjiang or Tibet are classified as Autonomous Regions, with their own local governments accountable to the minority ethnic groups these Autonomous Regions were created to serve. It’s simply not true to claim that these regions are colonies of the PRC - at the very least, we have to acknowledge that these are governments run by the minority ethnic groups that enjoy the popular support of these ethnic groups. It’s deeply chauvinist for western states to pick and choose the minor rebel groups in these areas to choose to support, when they’re both unpopular and unrepresentative of the general wishes of the people who actually live in these Autonomous Regions.

Secondly, the PRC’s economic policy is fundamentally different to those of western states. Where imperialist powers use the loan-debt-interest-structural adjustment cycle to break the backs of their colonies and force these states to adopt policy that keep the subordinate to the big powers, China’s international finance role has actually facilitated regional development and autonomy. Chinese loans come at interest rates far lower than states could access from imperialist institutions, and the Chinese government has a department whose responsibility is paying off the interest that the Chinese government itself is charging on loans. This level of debt forgiveness is actually only the first step - when countries have to default on loan payments to China, a study by the US-based Rhodium Group found that China almost never seizes assets to make up the cost. What they found was that almost without exception, China renegotiates loans to find a repayment rate that the borrower can maintain, or more often, straight up just forgives the debt. Looking over the last few years, researchers could find two instances where this didn’t happen. The example we’re often given of China taking ownership of a Sri Lankan port was one of two times China ever gained ownership of land in response to a debt default.

If you fill in this form, Equifax will send you $125 as part of its settlement with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the FTC, and 48 out of 50 states.

Equifax doxed the nation and profited handsomely from it. $125 is a laughably small sum given how much damage the data they hemorrhaged all over the internet could cause you. Equifax should have faced the corporate death penalty, the execs who oversaw the disaster should have had their assets seized and diverted to anti-identity-theft measures and charities.

Instead, the FTC et al are hitting the company for a maximum of $700m (how much they pay depends in part on whether you fill in this form.  Equifax’s market cap stands today at $16.6B, and it posted $3.412B in earnings in 2018, up 1.48% increase from 2017.

As meaningless as the $125 is, as piddling as the $700m is, you should still do this. As Josephine Wolff writes for Slate, breaches should be as expensive as possible. Anything you can do to make them more expensive will help people inside companies who are arguing against data-collection and retention, making the world safer for everyone else. Anything you can do to make breaches more expensive will hit the share price of companies that overcollect our data.

Go on, do it.

For those unfamiliar, Baby H was seized June 14th from her loving Indigenous family by social workers after the hospital reported her mother for failing to take care of her when she was medicated 90 minutes after a c section.

The baby has since been bounced through at least 5 foster homes, some non-Indigenous. Social workers are not communicating properly with the family, and even refused to continue meetings when the family attempted to record them for their protection. Some of the justifications for this action include outright lies (ie the claim that the parents are homeless. they actually have a 2 bedroom apartment.) Source

Social workers and the Canadian government have been doing this since confederation. They will take any possible excuse to remove Indigenous children from their families and communities. This is one of many ways they continue to attack our cultures and people. Just look at the foster care statistics in Canada:

DIRECTORY OF CRIMINAL SYSTEM BAIL FUNDS

National organizations funding bail across the U.S.

National Bail Out

The American Bar Association

Queer Detainee Empowerment Project

Freedom for Immigrants

Local organizations funding bail for immigrants

Arizona Tucson Second Chance Bail Fund Colorado Colorado Freedom Fund California Bay Area Immigration Bond Fund Immigrant Families Defense Fund The Orange County Justice Fund Connecticut Connecticut Bail Fund Immigrant Bail Fund Florida LGBTQ Freedom Fund Hawaii Hawaii Community Bail Fund Illinois Champaign County Bailout Coalition Chicago Community Bond Fund Iowa Eastern Iowa Community Bond Project Kentucky Louisville Community Bail Fund Louisiana New Orleans Safety & Freedom Fund YWCA Greater Baton Rouge Community Bail Fund Massachusetts Massachusetts Bail Fund Minnesota Minnesota Freedom Fund Nebraska Omaha Freedom Fund Nevada Vegas Freedom Fund New York City Bronx Freedom Fund Brooklyn Community Bail Fund Lorena Borjas Community Fund WSLS Bail Fund New York State Columbia County Bail Fund EOC of Suffolk Inc. Charitable Bail Fund OAR of Tompkins County Bail Fund Syracuse Jail Ministry North Carolina Southern Coalition for Social Justice Bail Fund Alamance County Community Bail Fund North Carolina Community Bail Fund of Durham Oregon Portland Freedom Fund Pennsylvania Dauphin County Bail Fund Philadelphia Community Bail Fund Philadelphia Bail Fund Tennessee Hamilton County Community Bail Fund Memphis Community Bail Fund Nashville Community Bail Fund Texas Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee Fianza Fund Community Bail Fund of North Texas Virginia Richmond Community Bail Fund Roanoke Community Bail Fund Charlottesville Community Resilience Fund Washington Northwest Community Bail Fund Wisconsin Free the 350 Bail Fund

DIRECTORY OF IMMIGRATION BOND FUNDS National organizations across the U.S.

Freedom for Immigrants National Bond Fund

Haitian Immigrant Bond Assistance Project

LGBTQ Freedom Fund

RAICES Bond Fund

In the ruling for Wiley v. State, the court emphasized that officers had violated the “personal liberty of both Capt. Bates and the deceased,” who, “having committed no crime, were entitled to proceed on their way without interruption or molestation.” This presented a broad statement on the rights of drivers. Entitling them to proceed on their way without interruption or molestation necessarily included the corresponding right to decide for themselves whether officers had legal cause to stop them. If they decided that an officer did not, then they would have had the additional right to refuse to pull over. Indeed, the court made this exact suggestion when it stated hypothetically that even if “the Bateses had heard [the officers’] outcries and refused to stop, no inference of guilt could have been reasonably drawn therefrom,” a mandatory inference to justify an interference with the Bateses’ right “to proceed on their way.” The rules of the road according to the Arizona Supreme Court would have made it extremely difficult for officers to stop a car they found suspicious. This was the world of Wiley v. State, when the police were few in number, easily mistaken for highwaymen, and limited in their authority over innocent citizens.

A century later, on July 10, 2015, a Texas state trooper pulled over Sandra Bland for failing to use a turn signal. After a tense dialogue, the traffic stop quickly came to a violent end. The trooper first tried to yank the young black woman from the car before forcing her out with a Taser gun. He then arrested Bland, who was lying face down, crying, and screaming in pain. Three days later, Bland was found dead in her jail cell. A year later, the Nation published an article that asked the question that had become a viral hashtag, #WhatHappenedtoSandraBland? To find the answer, the article examined Bland’s life, beginning with her birth to a single mother in Chicago’s West Side. The answer, according to the writer, was not just the neglectful conditions in that Texas county jail that led to her death. The answer was also unemployment, insufficient mental health care, and draconian drug laws.

But another motif, never named, loomed throughout the article. The automobile appeared in nearly every significant setback in Bland’s life. Exorbitant traffic tickets that Bland paid for by “sitting out” in jail. Convictions for driving under the influence and arrest warrants for unpaid traffic fines that severely limited her employment options. Charges for possessing marijuana—her lawyer suspected that Bland was self-medicating—that the police discovered in her car. In Bland’s life, the automobile played a prominent role as a site of violence, poverty, and discrimination.

The overpolicing of cars is a fact of life for people of color in the United States. Although Bland was not killed during the traffic stop, in 2015, the year of her death, 27 percent of police killings of unarmed citizens began with a traffic stop. Bland herself had been increasingly vocal on social media against police abuse and violence against African Americans, especially when the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum after a police officer fatally shot eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. It turned out that what had happened in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, was part of a larger trend. The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department and found “a pattern of unconstitutional policing” that skewed along racial lines. Most encounters with law enforcement, the report concluded, began with a traffic stop, an experience that disproportionately befell Ferguson’s black residents. In 2014 its municipal court had roughly 53,000 traffic cases, compared with about 50,000 nontraffic cases. This pattern was not limited to Ferguson. In their book In Context: Understanding Police Killings of Unarmed Citizens, scholars Nick Selby, Ben Singleton, and Ed Flosi concluded, “No form of direct government control comes close to [traffic] stops in sheer numbers, frequency, proportion of the population affected, and in many instances, the degree of coercive intrusion.”

What is the history that can account for the changes from Wiley v. State to Sandra Bland? Today, it would be improbable that Mrs. Bates, a wealthy white woman sitting in the passenger seat next to her influential husband, would be killed in a police shooting. Such tragedy now happens almost exclusively to minority drivers. Contrary to what one might expect, though, the social and legal developments that made the systematic policing of minorities possible did not originate with an intention to do so.

Instead, the shift began with the mass production of the automobile and the immediate imperative to regulate the motoring public. Before cars, U.S. police had more in common with their eighteenth-century forebears than with their twentieth-century successors. What revolutionized policing was a technological innovation that would come to define the new century. In the span of a century, towns and cities throughout the country—and not just in metropolitan centers—expanded their forces and professionalized beat cops, turning them into “law enforcement officers.” Figures are hard to come by, but one early report indicated that in the sixteen smallest states, the number of officers as a percentage of the population nearly doubled from 1910 to 1930.