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silveradeptLet's begin, with one thing that will hopefully be useful to you. sonia reminds us that many links you get or share have tracking data appended to them that can and should be removed.
To start, the firing of four officers from the Minnesota police department after it became clear one of them killed George Floyd and the other three did nothing to stop it. Which then produced a civil rights case being filed against the police department responsible and upgraded murder charges for the officer responsible and new charges for those who did not intervene. All of these things are because of mass demonstrations in the city demanding justce for a Black man killed by a white police officer (as a perfect microcosm of the system that does this day in and day out).
minoanmiss offers a point of contact for an institution that generally trains officers to shoot first and assess the real danger level second, with the encouragement to send requests for the training to change to something that will be less lethal. Because the problem and the solutions to the problem are not novel with this incident, but yet another chapter in the story that has been written over time. If you have been watching some amount of US television, basically at any point in your lifetime, then you've been exposed to the police procedural as a genre, which means that you are used to seeing most narratives about police from the perspective of the police, and because what you see in media is often what becomes real, there's a lot of police doing their best and not a lot of police behaving the ways that we have seen (again and again) captured in our reality. Assisted by stories from police repeated in the media about cops doing good that reinforces the idea that only a few police officers are the problem, rather than the conception of police itself. And while it may be a distinction without a difference in how they actually act, as swaldman highlighted in a post comparing police recruitment videos between the Metropolitan Police of London and the Alexandria, Louisiana police force, it's not hard to tell which of them at least pays lip service to the idea of being good people in their community and helping prevent crime and which of them are specifically looking for people who want to throw their weight around and use military-grade tools on the people they're nominally protecting.
Policing, and the attitude that the police are there to help that is taught as part of a white curriculum in schools, is at least in the same ballpark as Fobazi Ettarh's conception of vocational awe. With the caveat that the police don't have to do more with less because they have a passion for the work, which might render it not vocational awe at all, since at least some part of the justification for shorting libraries and other institutions that have a better shot at doing good is that their passion for the job will allow them to keep doing what they're doing on a smaller budget. I feel like the concepts are related, though, because in the messages we're given, people get into police because they want to catch criminals and keep people safe and because they think of it as a calling instead of a job. We're supposed to think of them as brave, smart, and benefits to their communities, and they always tell us that they're perennially underfunded, despite having massive chunks of everybody's budget, and that the police officers got into the profession because they wanted to serve, not because of the reality that it's a well-paying job where they get to act out fantasies of violence on people and advance a White Supremacist agenda. I feel like I'm describing something important, but with the wrong tool and the wrong terminology for it. But there's also some really twisting of this image by police making things more complicated, because police will do things like resign their membership in special task forces because one of them was disciplined for shoving a nonthreatening man to the ground, which might mean that the police believe and encourage vocational awe in others about them, even though it's entirely untrue.
Teen Vogue offers a guide on safely, properly, and effectively filming police actions such that, in the right hands, they can be used as good evidence in procedures against police officers who are acting illegally or with excess force. That guide is referenced by a lot of other guides, including a Vice guide to minimizing SARS-CoV-2 risk while protesting.
Speaking of pandemic and protest-related things, Buzzfeed recognizes that being exposed to tear gas could make your possible SARS-CoV-2 exposure worse, and ProPublica has scientists telling us that the compounds in tear gas break down mucus membranes and leave people more susceptible to viruses and other attackers, as well as aggravating and potentially causing respiratory complications. Popular Science has a guide for how one can minimize exposure and quickly stop the effects of the tear gas particles. And perhaps some protestors can take a look in the annals of the past and remanufacture Ayrton anti-gas fans for sending the tear particles back at those who are launching them. (That's assuming, of course, that the police aren't deliberately spraying you in the face with pepper spray, mace, or similar, because you're near them and they're looking for someone to lash out at.)
That's not the only thing being deployed under the "less lethal" banner that is supposed to make you think that the police still aren't trying to do maximum and deadly harm to the people protesting. Popular Science is at it again, this time explaining that rubber bullets, which may not be made of rubber, have the strong change of causing serious injury if fired at the head, which is, of course, completely against what their stated use is supposed to be, not that the police particularly care about your health and safety if they think you need to be hurt.
And, as one might expect, there needs to be dedicated space to separating the facts from the fictions, lies, and white supremacists trying to masquerade as people interested in the health and well-being of Black people. (Several efforts are underway.) It doesn't help that members of the media were arrested while covering the protests, although the governor at least had the sense to apologize for doing it once it became clear what had happened. At least one city has had locals who were protesting and attacking the institutions and corporations that were harming them and a later influx of white supremacists looking to attack and destroy the Black businesses and communities in that same space.
Because the cash bail system is a thing that exists and is weaponized to make sure people can't get out of jail, donating to a local bail fund is a big help, not just for putting protesters out of jail, but also so that they're not potentially exposed to the novel coronavirus while in prison. Autostraddle also has a list of possible bail funds to donate to.
The Current Administrator ordered protesters cleared with violence so that he could have his photograph taken in front of a church holding a copy of the Christian Foundational Writings. One of the protesters cleared was the celebrant of the church he used as the photo-op. Understandably, said clergy as well as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church condemned the use of religious iconography for political purposes and called on the Administrator to do a lot better. Some of the people involved claim they didn't know the full agenda of the visit. Others, both involved and not, think what they did was entirely in line with good politics and religion, boggling just about everybody else who wonders whether they've read any of the codexes and documents they claim to understand, uphold, and be the biggest fans of.
Bodies at the protests is not the only way to contribute to the movement. (To insist on that would be fundamentally ableist.) If you are there, being there, being part of a large mass that wants the machine to shut down, can help. There are more than a few guides out there about what to do at protests, especially if you're white, where you can leverage your privilege to make the police at least think for a moment before they engage in violence.
Different roles exist for different people to help out, some comfortable to a person, some not. Some of which might be more directly and immediately useful, some of which are more important on the back end, when people need inspiration or relief or someone to write an accurate history of what happened. (As a reminder to myself, although not as an excuse to myself: multiple roles are needed to make the work go. And yes, there's going to be a lot of anxiety about whether or not you're doing it right. It's in the piece, and several of those things are things you recognize.)
Sometimes it's knowing how to shut down bad arguments before they get started, especially that pernicious one about how violence never solved anything or got people to listen. (Happy Wrath, everybody. Now you have even more reason to understand why riots and big demonstrations are often the only effective means of getting in reality what you were promised in the law. But also, have some rainbows.) Some people open their doors to protestors and shelter them, even though the police often want to treat that as abetting or to convince the people holding protesters that they should turn them out. Sometimes you post messages for police and military forces reminding them of their obligations to disobey unlawful orders and asking them whether this kind of action is what they desired in a military career. (See above about police narratives and vocational awe, they apply equally as well to the perception of the military, such that when a general considered honorable expresses contempt for the Administrator turning out the military to quell protesting and the Commandant of the Marine Corps explicitly banning the public display of a battle standard used by those in rebellion to the United States, you find a lot of people objecting to these actions rather than praising them, because they have been sold a viewpoint that says the military does not have to think, only to follow orders and protect each other from consequences.)
Sometimes it's continuing to stand up for yourselves against an entire industry that wants you to stop being 'political' in a sport space, as if sport were ever not political. (The commissioner of the National Football League has at least admitted the league was wrong to suppress those who protested. We await the further commitment of action to statements from him and the league.
Sometimes it's calling people to account. Like those calling the Poetry Foundation to do more than just make a statement saying they' support black lives.
Sometimes it's putting your religious practice to work asking for protection of those who are going and protesting the injustice. (Which is probably a more respectful sentence than most of the coverage in that linked article, I'm saying.)
The mayor of the District of Columbia had "Black Lives Matter" painted on the street in front of the Current Administrator's residence, along with an official name change. Which is big and visible and needs to be accompanied by the part where the chief of police for Washington D.C. said that the violence would increase if his budget were cut, so mayor Bowser still has a lot of work to do.
A significant amount of props about these mass protests go to the K-pop stans, who have done a lot for making sure the focus stays in the right place. Trying to make sure new song releases don't trend over things like Black Lives Matter, flooding racist and fascist hashtags with fan content, (repeatedly and regularly), crashing police snitch applications and calls with fan content, repeatedly, wherever they might happen to appear. (To the point that there are now articles about this behavior, since it's new and noteworthy to anyone who doesn't follow K-pop sufficiently.
The truth is, the police have become the stopgap solutions for things they should have no business interfering in. Reducing the police, disarming them, taking away their funding, all of these things are necessary, but those funds then have to go toward building the social safety net that has been gutted and slashed and replaced by policing. Police forces that are structured and operate as organized crime should be disbanded and their monies reallocated. Because what are posted as statistics regarding police violence are usually not defined well enough to be useful, and what definitions they do have usually exclude wide swaths of the problem so that the police don't look terrible. And some of the methods being advocated are already in place in places that are still being violent and unaccountable. While the number of incidents might decrease if police are demilitarized and taught to slow down and assess rather than going in with guns blazing, we still need to have a clean break from the methods of the past.
In addition to defunding the police, we also need to work on dismantling the prison system that criminalizes minorities and incarcerates them into a system where they can be exploited, (more resources on prison abolition in this Twitter thread)
In less lethal affairs, the person being recorded calling the police when a Black birder asked her to leash her dog, as according to the law, has been sacked from her job for being a racist Karen. Or Cooper. Being somewhere that's not full of white people means you get less of that kind of harassment. Not none, but less, because someone's implicit bias is less likely to get the cops called on you. What we could use some more of is not perpetuating the headline that is "White person calls police on black person because black person was existing and living their lives.". Because, as is noted, and as we have seen so many times, what happens is that when the white people feel discomfort, they call in armed men to assuage their discomfort by hurting the thing that causes them discomfort. And because the structure of the headline's construction is the structure of the systems that produce those headlines. Change the headline by changing the action, and the system underneath changes as well.
This is not a problem that can be fixed by pretending it doesn't exist. Instead, it requires people engaging with what they have learned and internalized, figuring out how not to get defensive about it, so the can look with clearer eyes, and then figure out how to go forward. And doing this without looking at BIPOC to validate them or coddle them, and being able to accept being wrong when BIPOC say they're wrong. It's a big thing to contemplate in its entirety, but it's much more like staring at a block of marble and chipping away everything that's not an elephant. You have to keep a picture in mind, and then you have to try and make the elephant, and you have to keep trying, even if nothing you do looks like an elephant for the first thousands of tries. And it may never look like an elephant, but it needs to look more like an elephant each time around.
And everyone who benefits from white privilege, in every country where white privilege reigns supreme, has to do the work. (There are always suggestions on some places to start, some of which will be easier, some less so. And other suggestions.)
Because we've hit a magic combination of events where white people see and are personally experiencing how broken the social contract is, and there's been evidence of it that can't be denied, suppressed, or explained away, (video, Trevor Noah, who does a much better job with all of this than my paraphrase does). For at least some significant part of the country, we can start grappling with the question of when does a Black boy become a threat in the eyes of white society? (Video, Black boys, men, and mothers asking this and related questions) Because the system has failed everyone, but it's only now that the people who prescribed racism as the solution to everything, then doubled-down on it when it didn't look like ordinary amounts of racism were working, are finally, unavoidably, reaping the whirlwind in a way they can understand and are being hurt by. And because of that, there's a lot of small towns and cities with large protests of their own, which Anne Helen is documenting on Twitter.
(Paradoxically, and as a reminder to people like myself who have been trained to see that only by complete self-abnegation can we be entirely certain that we are doing the work, it does the movement no good if you don't take care of yourself. There's a lot to unpack there, and the piece goes into that. Being able to separate wants and needs, and thinking about the systems you set up and who else they might depend upon or obligate to do work, and having to trust people at their word when they say they are okay with it, or they will tell you when they are not okay with it, are all potential fuel for the anxiety spiral that will happily eat someone who is concerned and empathetic, who might relate to the world through guilt and absolution more than anything, and who can conceptualize the idea that there will never be a stopping point to the work and use it as a hair shirt and flagellation for more. As has been said before, secure your own mask before helping others. (This also can create anxiety, if your inner narrative is more than willing to accuse you of being selfish and not giving as much as you could while one of your traumas is around being in a situation where there just wasn't enough money to do more than try to stave off the ruin while someone else flat-out told you what they were contributing in in-kind was more than valuable enough that they didn't need to seriously curtail their spending habits or go find an additional source of income. And who took any soft no as "convince me" rather than as no.))
Here's the last thing for this time around on this subject, because there will be other times, with other names: The Last Seven Words of the Unarmed, a choral piece with orchestra that contains, unsurprisingly, movements named after those who have already been killed, as well as the words they spoke before expiring. Chilling, haunting, and expertly done on the technical parts of it.
Captain Awkward has suggestions on dealing with the feeling that not wanting what capitalist society says you should want, or know, or desire is somehow bad and wrong. Which ties into a lot of thoughts about the things above and the things below. And also reinforces the idea that should is a pernicious thing and often gets in the way of finding what you want (or even taking a break and acknowledging that you might be doing enough right now, because you are doing everything that you can do right now). We mostly do not find what makes us happy in our jobs, and for many of us, our jobs aren't interesting enough to make us happy. And that's true even when you're in a job where you're not being assaulted by vocational awe and people saying that your passion for your job should override any concerns you might have about it.
What kind of tropes would you really expect to see in fanworks, only to find there aren't all that many works with those tropes?
The phenomenon of hurt/comfort and the importance of the comfort part of the pairing in making it work. Because we see a lot of narratives where there's a lot of hurt involved but very little comfort. The fictional_fans discussion on hurt/comfort.
An open letter is collecting signatories to send to the UK's Women and Equalities minister in the hopes that she will focus on important issues instead of talking about what is very strongly aligned with TERF turf. The language itself is not openly TERFy, but for someone who recognizes the rhetoric, is sounds a lot like the things that are being pushed by groups that want to exclude trans women from being recognized as women.
Who you see on the cover of a book should reflect who is in the book. Despite being a 2010 article, there are still plenty of books that I know of that have BIPOC characters in them who are not represented on the cover. Even main characters who are BIPOC.
As one might expect, in times of economic precarity, sex work is getting many more new professionals, and many are likely to find it the same sort of situation that people trying to make rent with publishing have had for years. Although I suspect it's that publishing has recently been put in the same situation that sex work has always been in, but the article is framing it as "look at all these amateurs that are turning to sex work as a way of paying the bills", interspersed with "how much is the professional industry going to suffer from an inability to shoot and produce the films they're used to?" and not really doing much with either.
Always check to make sure you have the name and address right if you are contracted to tie someone up in a sex fantasy. Thankfully, there was enough evidence to prove what happened was a case of mistaken identity and nobody was hurt, but all the same, triple-check everything.
Citations for reckless driving and exceeding the speed limit are up, as people apparently think that less traffic on the roads is a reason to go faster. The additional consequence of that is that when someone does cause a collision, the increased speeds make those collisions much more fatal.
Tony Hawk's first skateboard is part of a national history collection, and the interview article there highlights, but doesn't go completely into, the tension between skateboarding as a respectable sport with aerial tricks that deserves sponsorships and respect and skateboarding as a counterculture activity, treating the world around as an obstacle course, in much the way that parkour and freerunning do. Because there's still plenty of anti-skateboard sentiment, signs, and attitudes in the world around. As with anything that started in the counterculture, the question of authenticity is an important one, so I would expect Tony Hawk to be polarizing - the reason why people might have gotten into it, but also the symbol of corporate selling-out at the same time. Which I'll put next to a piece about minimalism, the SoHo loft space, and how it's been commercialized into the idea of a farmhouse aesthetic devoid of color and clutter alike, supposedly with the idea of open spaces, natural light, and anything that might make a place look like it was meant for people, instead of photographs, because one of the things I like doing in these roundups is juxtaposition of ideas, or variations on the same idea in different places. (What can I say? Librarianship tends toward making connections between things.)
The Washington Post profiles Stacey Abrams, paying attention to what she's not interested in doing and what she is interested in doing. Some of the social circles I follow have said very strongly that Mr. Biden, as the Democratic nominee, needs to have a Black woman as his running mate to keep him from gaffing with regard to the constituency he needs the most to win. If that's the case, Stacey Abrams would be a very good choice.
The difficulty of getting everyone to adhere to good practices to stop the spread of the virus is that it's still difficult to explain the collective impact on highly individualistic people who are right that their particular thing isn't much, but that if everyone does it, we're all hosed. At the same time, there's also the possibility of forming small quarantine pods with your neighbors or friends as a way of staving off the potential bad mental health that might result from being too much by yourself without in-person contact. Because there are always competing interests when it comes to keeping people healthy.
Many of the casinos of Las Vegas, Nevada, are getting ready to re-open, albeit with significant changes to how many people can be gambling, and not necessarily with all of their attractions available. This seems like a bad idea. Given that a county in California that opened swiftly had to close for a while because of the sharp uptick in coronavirus infections they collected, it seems like if someone is opening, they should do so slowly. More than a few churches do not intend to open slowly.
A doctor in San Francisco caught the virus, and now, several months later, seems to still have it in her despite having gone through the worst of the symptoms. Others, however, have long-term health effects of the virus.
Smartphone apps that claim to measure blood oxygenation levels aren't able to do it in a trustworthy way.
One Mr. Cummings, part of the current Johnson government in the UK, violated the lockdown orders issued by his own government with his family, involving a significant amount of exposure risk to the population and to his family. The Government backed their person, and at least one unsubstantiated and highly shared rumor suggested the entire family came with on the trip because the small was on the autism spectrum, which drew criticism and immediate fact-checking to expose the thing. (And that at least one of the trips was for grief, but that doesn't explain the other trips.) To put it mildly, for this particular incident, just about every paper in the UK thought this particular incident a poor reflection on the Government. To the point where ministers that had been urged to support the action are now distancing themselves from it. And, after all of that, the only thing that's consistent seems to be that Mr. Cummings broke the rules and is throwing every excuse that he can think of (or that others can think of on his behalf) to see if any of them stick. And yes, they're still trying to explain away what happened. (And if this still doesn't make any sense, it's not supposed to.rydra_wong tried rather hard to explain was explainable, even though it doesn't explain anything. So did someone else, with the same amount of sheer WTF involved.)
And, in a perfect example of the Scunthorpe problem doing some good for once, the keyword filters on Twitter prevented searching for said name.
The prevailing attitude in the Russian Federation seems to be much the same as in the United States - hunker down, pray you don't lose everything, and don't expect the government to help you. Which may have a sinister bent if the rash of people critical to the coronavirus response falling out of windows continues to happen.
In Pennsylvania, a Republican state legislator tested positive for the coronavirus, but only Republicans knew that this had happened. The Democrats found out from the media, which could be disastrous if any of them were infected from the member or any of the people that he gave it to. Because some parties in this country don't think it at all a problem to potentially permanently injure or kill their political opponents if it means better results for them. Puerto Rico knew that in the way that the Current Administrator left them to die after hurricanes. Call it a dress rehearsal for the way he is interested in letting his opponents die of COVID-19, when he's not actively trying to get them killed because they want justice for police actions.
Hertz has filed for bankruptcy, as both travel rental and used car sales are not exactly booming. nd speaking of economics, here's a quick primer on the various letters that might be used to describe the possible recovery shapes, when there's an actual recovery on. Of course, that presupposes that the economics and politics that has been running the show to this point are right and we need to get back to things the way they're telling us to. What we could instead be doing is taking in this international pause and thinking, advocating, and trying to build something new and better that can handle shocks more effectively and that isn't trying to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of a system to enrich a tiny few. Which coincidentally makes it more vulnerable to the big shocks. Something about how people who have a reserve of energy stored in the body do better when they have to deal with many things.
Living through traumatic and scary events takes energy, energy that would have gone to other things, and so people are feeling stressed and tired more than usual and more frequently than usual. And that's before more collective trauma is heaped upon them in the form of other disasters, major and minor. The stress of this and the lack of energy can also lead to caution fatigue, where we stop doing the things we need to do because we're tired and don't have the energy to maintain precautions.
Art on masks, proceeds donated to helping speed the process of defeating the coronavirus, which the artist says is likely to get people to collect them rather than use them. But all the same, the money goes to help. What I would love to see is a ban on re-selling them, so that a person has a piece of art that they can wear or admire, but not profit for themselves on the pandemic.
And also, wear a fucking mask (assuming you can do so). No, there really isn't a reason not to, not for machismo, not for liberty, not for any reason that isn't essentially "I can't breathe wearing a mask".
Observing the way that nature (and orcas) do things show us that connection to community and family are important things for us so that we can all survive together, lacking official alcohol in certain nations, some home brewers are using pineapples to brew some booze of their own, a cat learning to walk on a treadmill, the herons in Regents Park, and a video of a person building an athletics course for squirrels, and the squirrels that run the course.
Science quests for children to do while at home. Virtual programs from the Maritime Aquarium, and writing exercises for young writers. Aboriginal Australian artists using their media to record, recall, and show others what they suffered at the hands of white fosters during programs meant to take Aboriginal children and turn them white, which should sound familiar to Indigenous people everywhere in the world.
Combining the deeply personal arts of cartomancy through Tarot and tattooing to create Body Spells, tattoos first drawn to be oracle cards and then inked onto the body of the querant that drew it. This has feels attached to it. I think it's because I recognize the very personal decisions that go into getting a tattoo, because almost all tattooing, at least in the States, is connected to memory, a means by which something cannot be forgotten, because it has been inked into the body. Tattoos can be removed or altered if needed, but there's a lot of power and vulnerability that goes into getting and showing one's tattoos, given the cultural attitudes that often accompany the presence of body ink. Where it is, what it is, and how much of it there is change how a person is perceived.
And much of the same vulnerability comes when you consult oracle cards and other forms of divination, because most of those oracles are meant to have specific meaning to the querant and their inquiry. Which may or may not be any meaning known to the person helping the querant at all. So, yes, it's an interesting piece and I like it a lot.
The National Hockey League unveiled a plan for the Stanley Cup Playoffs for 2020, involving a seeding and several games played all in a single (or few) locations without fans in the stadia. None of the games will take place in Canada, as the travel restrictions and quarantine requirements that will not be relaxed for the hockey players would make a Canadian site impossible. Which, yes, lost revenue, but good for the provinces that are sticking to their requirements. The National Basketball Association is considering having the rest of its seasons games play out in a single building. The IOC is considering what a more simplified version of the Olympic Games might be.
The International Olympic Committees are almost at parity between men and women, with the election of two new women chairs. Which is actually pretty nice.
In technology, Yukata Zero, trying to make it possible for people to enjoy wearing yukata-type garments and make them accessible to newcomers or those with disabilities, which, from the looks of the pictures involved, means two different types of breaking the yukata up into separate pieces that can be put on in sequence to create a full yukata, where there are snaps, or whether the obi holds the two pieces together and hides the piecing, and a third model that is adjustable to the body shape of the person with some hidden buttons. All of the models appear to be meant for women, but it's a good idea to see.
A game being played that replicates the experience and fears of being inside during the pandemic. The review makes it sound like the kind of thing that people who enjoy playing games that only obliquely reference the fact that they're psychological horror games would find helpful.
Utilizing the waste heat of photovoltaic power generation to desalinate water through evaporation and condensation, allowing for electricity and drinking water from the same setup, which is pretty cool.
A situation in which everyone has correct information and conclusions, and a problem is solved because someone knows where to draw the chalk circle. (I boggle at how this scenario became possible, but I know that technology has some interesting error modes and ways of carrying on despite them.)
Last for tonight, In society where everyone has their niche, it is unwise to try and remove a niche because you think it's ill-adapted. Because it might come around, later on, that the situation for which that niche will excel arrives.
a handy page of isolation stunt fight sequences, courtesythewayne. Not for you if you get weirded out by people swinging at the camera, and at least one of them has blood effects and knife stabbing. Others have some amount of firearms in there.
How a song carved in stone as a memory to a dead wife became a theme listened to by millions of people, because it was incorporated into a computer game.
A request to have sent birthday cards to a 100 year-old SFF fan, present for the very first WorldCon. (Sorry, I do these in batches, but some belated birthday wishes will hopefully not be amiss.)
And some art of a kaiju carrying all their children and explaining to them the proper way to wreck a city.
sonia reminds us that many links you get or share have tracking data appended to them that can and should be removed.To start, the firing of four officers from the Minnesota police department after it became clear one of them killed George Floyd and the other three did nothing to stop it. Which then produced a civil rights case being filed against the police department responsible and upgraded murder charges for the officer responsible and new charges for those who did not intervene. All of these things are because of mass demonstrations in the city demanding justce for a Black man killed by a white police officer (as a perfect microcosm of the system that does this day in and day out).
minoanmiss offers a point of contact for an institution that generally trains officers to shoot first and assess the real danger level second, with the encouragement to send requests for the training to change to something that will be less lethal. Because the problem and the solutions to the problem are not novel with this incident, but yet another chapter in the story that has been written over time. If you have been watching some amount of US television, basically at any point in your lifetime, then you've been exposed to the police procedural as a genre, which means that you are used to seeing most narratives about police from the perspective of the police, and because what you see in media is often what becomes real, there's a lot of police doing their best and not a lot of police behaving the ways that we have seen (again and again) captured in our reality. Assisted by stories from police repeated in the media about cops doing good that reinforces the idea that only a few police officers are the problem, rather than the conception of police itself. And while it may be a distinction without a difference in how they actually act, as swaldman highlighted in a post comparing police recruitment videos between the Metropolitan Police of London and the Alexandria, Louisiana police force, it's not hard to tell which of them at least pays lip service to the idea of being good people in their community and helping prevent crime and which of them are specifically looking for people who want to throw their weight around and use military-grade tools on the people they're nominally protecting.Policing, and the attitude that the police are there to help that is taught as part of a white curriculum in schools, is at least in the same ballpark as Fobazi Ettarh's conception of vocational awe. With the caveat that the police don't have to do more with less because they have a passion for the work, which might render it not vocational awe at all, since at least some part of the justification for shorting libraries and other institutions that have a better shot at doing good is that their passion for the job will allow them to keep doing what they're doing on a smaller budget. I feel like the concepts are related, though, because in the messages we're given, people get into police because they want to catch criminals and keep people safe and because they think of it as a calling instead of a job. We're supposed to think of them as brave, smart, and benefits to their communities, and they always tell us that they're perennially underfunded, despite having massive chunks of everybody's budget, and that the police officers got into the profession because they wanted to serve, not because of the reality that it's a well-paying job where they get to act out fantasies of violence on people and advance a White Supremacist agenda. I feel like I'm describing something important, but with the wrong tool and the wrong terminology for it. But there's also some really twisting of this image by police making things more complicated, because police will do things like resign their membership in special task forces because one of them was disciplined for shoving a nonthreatening man to the ground, which might mean that the police believe and encourage vocational awe in others about them, even though it's entirely untrue.
Teen Vogue offers a guide on safely, properly, and effectively filming police actions such that, in the right hands, they can be used as good evidence in procedures against police officers who are acting illegally or with excess force. That guide is referenced by a lot of other guides, including a Vice guide to minimizing SARS-CoV-2 risk while protesting.
Speaking of pandemic and protest-related things, Buzzfeed recognizes that being exposed to tear gas could make your possible SARS-CoV-2 exposure worse, and ProPublica has scientists telling us that the compounds in tear gas break down mucus membranes and leave people more susceptible to viruses and other attackers, as well as aggravating and potentially causing respiratory complications. Popular Science has a guide for how one can minimize exposure and quickly stop the effects of the tear gas particles. And perhaps some protestors can take a look in the annals of the past and remanufacture Ayrton anti-gas fans for sending the tear particles back at those who are launching them. (That's assuming, of course, that the police aren't deliberately spraying you in the face with pepper spray, mace, or similar, because you're near them and they're looking for someone to lash out at.)
That's not the only thing being deployed under the "less lethal" banner that is supposed to make you think that the police still aren't trying to do maximum and deadly harm to the people protesting. Popular Science is at it again, this time explaining that rubber bullets, which may not be made of rubber, have the strong change of causing serious injury if fired at the head, which is, of course, completely against what their stated use is supposed to be, not that the police particularly care about your health and safety if they think you need to be hurt.
And, as one might expect, there needs to be dedicated space to separating the facts from the fictions, lies, and white supremacists trying to masquerade as people interested in the health and well-being of Black people. (Several efforts are underway.) It doesn't help that members of the media were arrested while covering the protests, although the governor at least had the sense to apologize for doing it once it became clear what had happened. At least one city has had locals who were protesting and attacking the institutions and corporations that were harming them and a later influx of white supremacists looking to attack and destroy the Black businesses and communities in that same space.
Because the cash bail system is a thing that exists and is weaponized to make sure people can't get out of jail, donating to a local bail fund is a big help, not just for putting protesters out of jail, but also so that they're not potentially exposed to the novel coronavirus while in prison. Autostraddle also has a list of possible bail funds to donate to.
The Current Administrator ordered protesters cleared with violence so that he could have his photograph taken in front of a church holding a copy of the Christian Foundational Writings. One of the protesters cleared was the celebrant of the church he used as the photo-op. Understandably, said clergy as well as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church condemned the use of religious iconography for political purposes and called on the Administrator to do a lot better. Some of the people involved claim they didn't know the full agenda of the visit. Others, both involved and not, think what they did was entirely in line with good politics and religion, boggling just about everybody else who wonders whether they've read any of the codexes and documents they claim to understand, uphold, and be the biggest fans of.
Bodies at the protests is not the only way to contribute to the movement. (To insist on that would be fundamentally ableist.) If you are there, being there, being part of a large mass that wants the machine to shut down, can help. There are more than a few guides out there about what to do at protests, especially if you're white, where you can leverage your privilege to make the police at least think for a moment before they engage in violence.
Different roles exist for different people to help out, some comfortable to a person, some not. Some of which might be more directly and immediately useful, some of which are more important on the back end, when people need inspiration or relief or someone to write an accurate history of what happened. (As a reminder to myself, although not as an excuse to myself: multiple roles are needed to make the work go. And yes, there's going to be a lot of anxiety about whether or not you're doing it right. It's in the piece, and several of those things are things you recognize.)
Sometimes it's knowing how to shut down bad arguments before they get started, especially that pernicious one about how violence never solved anything or got people to listen. (Happy Wrath, everybody. Now you have even more reason to understand why riots and big demonstrations are often the only effective means of getting in reality what you were promised in the law. But also, have some rainbows.) Some people open their doors to protestors and shelter them, even though the police often want to treat that as abetting or to convince the people holding protesters that they should turn them out. Sometimes you post messages for police and military forces reminding them of their obligations to disobey unlawful orders and asking them whether this kind of action is what they desired in a military career. (See above about police narratives and vocational awe, they apply equally as well to the perception of the military, such that when a general considered honorable expresses contempt for the Administrator turning out the military to quell protesting and the Commandant of the Marine Corps explicitly banning the public display of a battle standard used by those in rebellion to the United States, you find a lot of people objecting to these actions rather than praising them, because they have been sold a viewpoint that says the military does not have to think, only to follow orders and protect each other from consequences.)
Sometimes it's continuing to stand up for yourselves against an entire industry that wants you to stop being 'political' in a sport space, as if sport were ever not political. (The commissioner of the National Football League has at least admitted the league was wrong to suppress those who protested. We await the further commitment of action to statements from him and the league.
Sometimes it's calling people to account. Like those calling the Poetry Foundation to do more than just make a statement saying they' support black lives.
Sometimes it's putting your religious practice to work asking for protection of those who are going and protesting the injustice. (Which is probably a more respectful sentence than most of the coverage in that linked article, I'm saying.)
The mayor of the District of Columbia had "Black Lives Matter" painted on the street in front of the Current Administrator's residence, along with an official name change. Which is big and visible and needs to be accompanied by the part where the chief of police for Washington D.C. said that the violence would increase if his budget were cut, so mayor Bowser still has a lot of work to do.
A significant amount of props about these mass protests go to the K-pop stans, who have done a lot for making sure the focus stays in the right place. Trying to make sure new song releases don't trend over things like Black Lives Matter, flooding racist and fascist hashtags with fan content, (repeatedly and regularly), crashing police snitch applications and calls with fan content, repeatedly, wherever they might happen to appear. (To the point that there are now articles about this behavior, since it's new and noteworthy to anyone who doesn't follow K-pop sufficiently.
The truth is, the police have become the stopgap solutions for things they should have no business interfering in. Reducing the police, disarming them, taking away their funding, all of these things are necessary, but those funds then have to go toward building the social safety net that has been gutted and slashed and replaced by policing. Police forces that are structured and operate as organized crime should be disbanded and their monies reallocated. Because what are posted as statistics regarding police violence are usually not defined well enough to be useful, and what definitions they do have usually exclude wide swaths of the problem so that the police don't look terrible. And some of the methods being advocated are already in place in places that are still being violent and unaccountable. While the number of incidents might decrease if police are demilitarized and taught to slow down and assess rather than going in with guns blazing, we still need to have a clean break from the methods of the past.
In addition to defunding the police, we also need to work on dismantling the prison system that criminalizes minorities and incarcerates them into a system where they can be exploited, (more resources on prison abolition in this Twitter thread)
In less lethal affairs, the person being recorded calling the police when a Black birder asked her to leash her dog, as according to the law, has been sacked from her job for being a racist Karen. Or Cooper. Being somewhere that's not full of white people means you get less of that kind of harassment. Not none, but less, because someone's implicit bias is less likely to get the cops called on you. What we could use some more of is not perpetuating the headline that is "White person calls police on black person because black person was existing and living their lives.". Because, as is noted, and as we have seen so many times, what happens is that when the white people feel discomfort, they call in armed men to assuage their discomfort by hurting the thing that causes them discomfort. And because the structure of the headline's construction is the structure of the systems that produce those headlines. Change the headline by changing the action, and the system underneath changes as well.
This is not a problem that can be fixed by pretending it doesn't exist. Instead, it requires people engaging with what they have learned and internalized, figuring out how not to get defensive about it, so the can look with clearer eyes, and then figure out how to go forward. And doing this without looking at BIPOC to validate them or coddle them, and being able to accept being wrong when BIPOC say they're wrong. It's a big thing to contemplate in its entirety, but it's much more like staring at a block of marble and chipping away everything that's not an elephant. You have to keep a picture in mind, and then you have to try and make the elephant, and you have to keep trying, even if nothing you do looks like an elephant for the first thousands of tries. And it may never look like an elephant, but it needs to look more like an elephant each time around.
And everyone who benefits from white privilege, in every country where white privilege reigns supreme, has to do the work. (There are always suggestions on some places to start, some of which will be easier, some less so. And other suggestions.)
Because we've hit a magic combination of events where white people see and are personally experiencing how broken the social contract is, and there's been evidence of it that can't be denied, suppressed, or explained away, (video, Trevor Noah, who does a much better job with all of this than my paraphrase does). For at least some significant part of the country, we can start grappling with the question of when does a Black boy become a threat in the eyes of white society? (Video, Black boys, men, and mothers asking this and related questions) Because the system has failed everyone, but it's only now that the people who prescribed racism as the solution to everything, then doubled-down on it when it didn't look like ordinary amounts of racism were working, are finally, unavoidably, reaping the whirlwind in a way they can understand and are being hurt by. And because of that, there's a lot of small towns and cities with large protests of their own, which Anne Helen is documenting on Twitter.
(Paradoxically, and as a reminder to people like myself who have been trained to see that only by complete self-abnegation can we be entirely certain that we are doing the work, it does the movement no good if you don't take care of yourself. There's a lot to unpack there, and the piece goes into that. Being able to separate wants and needs, and thinking about the systems you set up and who else they might depend upon or obligate to do work, and having to trust people at their word when they say they are okay with it, or they will tell you when they are not okay with it, are all potential fuel for the anxiety spiral that will happily eat someone who is concerned and empathetic, who might relate to the world through guilt and absolution more than anything, and who can conceptualize the idea that there will never be a stopping point to the work and use it as a hair shirt and flagellation for more. As has been said before, secure your own mask before helping others. (This also can create anxiety, if your inner narrative is more than willing to accuse you of being selfish and not giving as much as you could while one of your traumas is around being in a situation where there just wasn't enough money to do more than try to stave off the ruin while someone else flat-out told you what they were contributing in in-kind was more than valuable enough that they didn't need to seriously curtail their spending habits or go find an additional source of income. And who took any soft no as "convince me" rather than as no.))
Here's the last thing for this time around on this subject, because there will be other times, with other names: The Last Seven Words of the Unarmed, a choral piece with orchestra that contains, unsurprisingly, movements named after those who have already been killed, as well as the words they spoke before expiring. Chilling, haunting, and expertly done on the technical parts of it.
Captain Awkward has suggestions on dealing with the feeling that not wanting what capitalist society says you should want, or know, or desire is somehow bad and wrong. Which ties into a lot of thoughts about the things above and the things below. And also reinforces the idea that should is a pernicious thing and often gets in the way of finding what you want (or even taking a break and acknowledging that you might be doing enough right now, because you are doing everything that you can do right now). We mostly do not find what makes us happy in our jobs, and for many of us, our jobs aren't interesting enough to make us happy. And that's true even when you're in a job where you're not being assaulted by vocational awe and people saying that your passion for your job should override any concerns you might have about it.
What kind of tropes would you really expect to see in fanworks, only to find there aren't all that many works with those tropes?
The phenomenon of hurt/comfort and the importance of the comfort part of the pairing in making it work. Because we see a lot of narratives where there's a lot of hurt involved but very little comfort. The fictional_fans discussion on hurt/comfort.
An open letter is collecting signatories to send to the UK's Women and Equalities minister in the hopes that she will focus on important issues instead of talking about what is very strongly aligned with TERF turf. The language itself is not openly TERFy, but for someone who recognizes the rhetoric, is sounds a lot like the things that are being pushed by groups that want to exclude trans women from being recognized as women.
Who you see on the cover of a book should reflect who is in the book. Despite being a 2010 article, there are still plenty of books that I know of that have BIPOC characters in them who are not represented on the cover. Even main characters who are BIPOC.
As one might expect, in times of economic precarity, sex work is getting many more new professionals, and many are likely to find it the same sort of situation that people trying to make rent with publishing have had for years. Although I suspect it's that publishing has recently been put in the same situation that sex work has always been in, but the article is framing it as "look at all these amateurs that are turning to sex work as a way of paying the bills", interspersed with "how much is the professional industry going to suffer from an inability to shoot and produce the films they're used to?" and not really doing much with either.
Always check to make sure you have the name and address right if you are contracted to tie someone up in a sex fantasy. Thankfully, there was enough evidence to prove what happened was a case of mistaken identity and nobody was hurt, but all the same, triple-check everything.
Citations for reckless driving and exceeding the speed limit are up, as people apparently think that less traffic on the roads is a reason to go faster. The additional consequence of that is that when someone does cause a collision, the increased speeds make those collisions much more fatal.
Tony Hawk's first skateboard is part of a national history collection, and the interview article there highlights, but doesn't go completely into, the tension between skateboarding as a respectable sport with aerial tricks that deserves sponsorships and respect and skateboarding as a counterculture activity, treating the world around as an obstacle course, in much the way that parkour and freerunning do. Because there's still plenty of anti-skateboard sentiment, signs, and attitudes in the world around. As with anything that started in the counterculture, the question of authenticity is an important one, so I would expect Tony Hawk to be polarizing - the reason why people might have gotten into it, but also the symbol of corporate selling-out at the same time. Which I'll put next to a piece about minimalism, the SoHo loft space, and how it's been commercialized into the idea of a farmhouse aesthetic devoid of color and clutter alike, supposedly with the idea of open spaces, natural light, and anything that might make a place look like it was meant for people, instead of photographs, because one of the things I like doing in these roundups is juxtaposition of ideas, or variations on the same idea in different places. (What can I say? Librarianship tends toward making connections between things.)
The Washington Post profiles Stacey Abrams, paying attention to what she's not interested in doing and what she is interested in doing. Some of the social circles I follow have said very strongly that Mr. Biden, as the Democratic nominee, needs to have a Black woman as his running mate to keep him from gaffing with regard to the constituency he needs the most to win. If that's the case, Stacey Abrams would be a very good choice.
The difficulty of getting everyone to adhere to good practices to stop the spread of the virus is that it's still difficult to explain the collective impact on highly individualistic people who are right that their particular thing isn't much, but that if everyone does it, we're all hosed. At the same time, there's also the possibility of forming small quarantine pods with your neighbors or friends as a way of staving off the potential bad mental health that might result from being too much by yourself without in-person contact. Because there are always competing interests when it comes to keeping people healthy.
Many of the casinos of Las Vegas, Nevada, are getting ready to re-open, albeit with significant changes to how many people can be gambling, and not necessarily with all of their attractions available. This seems like a bad idea. Given that a county in California that opened swiftly had to close for a while because of the sharp uptick in coronavirus infections they collected, it seems like if someone is opening, they should do so slowly. More than a few churches do not intend to open slowly.
A doctor in San Francisco caught the virus, and now, several months later, seems to still have it in her despite having gone through the worst of the symptoms. Others, however, have long-term health effects of the virus.
Smartphone apps that claim to measure blood oxygenation levels aren't able to do it in a trustworthy way.
One Mr. Cummings, part of the current Johnson government in the UK, violated the lockdown orders issued by his own government with his family, involving a significant amount of exposure risk to the population and to his family. The Government backed their person, and at least one unsubstantiated and highly shared rumor suggested the entire family came with on the trip because the small was on the autism spectrum, which drew criticism and immediate fact-checking to expose the thing. (And that at least one of the trips was for grief, but that doesn't explain the other trips.) To put it mildly, for this particular incident, just about every paper in the UK thought this particular incident a poor reflection on the Government. To the point where ministers that had been urged to support the action are now distancing themselves from it. And, after all of that, the only thing that's consistent seems to be that Mr. Cummings broke the rules and is throwing every excuse that he can think of (or that others can think of on his behalf) to see if any of them stick. And yes, they're still trying to explain away what happened. (And if this still doesn't make any sense, it's not supposed to.
rydra_wong tried rather hard to explain was explainable, even though it doesn't explain anything. So did someone else, with the same amount of sheer WTF involved.)And, in a perfect example of the Scunthorpe problem doing some good for once, the keyword filters on Twitter prevented searching for said name.
The prevailing attitude in the Russian Federation seems to be much the same as in the United States - hunker down, pray you don't lose everything, and don't expect the government to help you. Which may have a sinister bent if the rash of people critical to the coronavirus response falling out of windows continues to happen.
In Pennsylvania, a Republican state legislator tested positive for the coronavirus, but only Republicans knew that this had happened. The Democrats found out from the media, which could be disastrous if any of them were infected from the member or any of the people that he gave it to. Because some parties in this country don't think it at all a problem to potentially permanently injure or kill their political opponents if it means better results for them. Puerto Rico knew that in the way that the Current Administrator left them to die after hurricanes. Call it a dress rehearsal for the way he is interested in letting his opponents die of COVID-19, when he's not actively trying to get them killed because they want justice for police actions.
Hertz has filed for bankruptcy, as both travel rental and used car sales are not exactly booming. nd speaking of economics, here's a quick primer on the various letters that might be used to describe the possible recovery shapes, when there's an actual recovery on. Of course, that presupposes that the economics and politics that has been running the show to this point are right and we need to get back to things the way they're telling us to. What we could instead be doing is taking in this international pause and thinking, advocating, and trying to build something new and better that can handle shocks more effectively and that isn't trying to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of a system to enrich a tiny few. Which coincidentally makes it more vulnerable to the big shocks. Something about how people who have a reserve of energy stored in the body do better when they have to deal with many things.
Living through traumatic and scary events takes energy, energy that would have gone to other things, and so people are feeling stressed and tired more than usual and more frequently than usual. And that's before more collective trauma is heaped upon them in the form of other disasters, major and minor. The stress of this and the lack of energy can also lead to caution fatigue, where we stop doing the things we need to do because we're tired and don't have the energy to maintain precautions.
Art on masks, proceeds donated to helping speed the process of defeating the coronavirus, which the artist says is likely to get people to collect them rather than use them. But all the same, the money goes to help. What I would love to see is a ban on re-selling them, so that a person has a piece of art that they can wear or admire, but not profit for themselves on the pandemic.
And also, wear a fucking mask (assuming you can do so). No, there really isn't a reason not to, not for machismo, not for liberty, not for any reason that isn't essentially "I can't breathe wearing a mask".
Observing the way that nature (and orcas) do things show us that connection to community and family are important things for us so that we can all survive together, lacking official alcohol in certain nations, some home brewers are using pineapples to brew some booze of their own, a cat learning to walk on a treadmill, the herons in Regents Park, and a video of a person building an athletics course for squirrels, and the squirrels that run the course.
Science quests for children to do while at home. Virtual programs from the Maritime Aquarium, and writing exercises for young writers. Aboriginal Australian artists using their media to record, recall, and show others what they suffered at the hands of white fosters during programs meant to take Aboriginal children and turn them white, which should sound familiar to Indigenous people everywhere in the world.
Combining the deeply personal arts of cartomancy through Tarot and tattooing to create Body Spells, tattoos first drawn to be oracle cards and then inked onto the body of the querant that drew it. This has feels attached to it. I think it's because I recognize the very personal decisions that go into getting a tattoo, because almost all tattooing, at least in the States, is connected to memory, a means by which something cannot be forgotten, because it has been inked into the body. Tattoos can be removed or altered if needed, but there's a lot of power and vulnerability that goes into getting and showing one's tattoos, given the cultural attitudes that often accompany the presence of body ink. Where it is, what it is, and how much of it there is change how a person is perceived.
And much of the same vulnerability comes when you consult oracle cards and other forms of divination, because most of those oracles are meant to have specific meaning to the querant and their inquiry. Which may or may not be any meaning known to the person helping the querant at all. So, yes, it's an interesting piece and I like it a lot.
The National Hockey League unveiled a plan for the Stanley Cup Playoffs for 2020, involving a seeding and several games played all in a single (or few) locations without fans in the stadia. None of the games will take place in Canada, as the travel restrictions and quarantine requirements that will not be relaxed for the hockey players would make a Canadian site impossible. Which, yes, lost revenue, but good for the provinces that are sticking to their requirements. The National Basketball Association is considering having the rest of its seasons games play out in a single building. The IOC is considering what a more simplified version of the Olympic Games might be.
The International Olympic Committees are almost at parity between men and women, with the election of two new women chairs. Which is actually pretty nice.
In technology, Yukata Zero, trying to make it possible for people to enjoy wearing yukata-type garments and make them accessible to newcomers or those with disabilities, which, from the looks of the pictures involved, means two different types of breaking the yukata up into separate pieces that can be put on in sequence to create a full yukata, where there are snaps, or whether the obi holds the two pieces together and hides the piecing, and a third model that is adjustable to the body shape of the person with some hidden buttons. All of the models appear to be meant for women, but it's a good idea to see.
A game being played that replicates the experience and fears of being inside during the pandemic. The review makes it sound like the kind of thing that people who enjoy playing games that only obliquely reference the fact that they're psychological horror games would find helpful.
Utilizing the waste heat of photovoltaic power generation to desalinate water through evaporation and condensation, allowing for electricity and drinking water from the same setup, which is pretty cool.
A situation in which everyone has correct information and conclusions, and a problem is solved because someone knows where to draw the chalk circle. (I boggle at how this scenario became possible, but I know that technology has some interesting error modes and ways of carrying on despite them.)
Last for tonight, In society where everyone has their niche, it is unwise to try and remove a niche because you think it's ill-adapted. Because it might come around, later on, that the situation for which that niche will excel arrives.
a handy page of isolation stunt fight sequences, courtesy
thewayne. Not for you if you get weirded out by people swinging at the camera, and at least one of them has blood effects and knife stabbing. Others have some amount of firearms in there.How a song carved in stone as a memory to a dead wife became a theme listened to by millions of people, because it was incorporated into a computer game.
A request to have sent birthday cards to a 100 year-old SFF fan, present for the very first WorldCon. (Sorry, I do these in batches, but some belated birthday wishes will hopefully not be amiss.)
And some art of a kaiju carrying all their children and explaining to them the proper way to wreck a city.
