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oc-poll-tournament · 10 months ago

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OC Poll Tournament Round 3 Finale!

Propaganda below the cut:

Chess (she/her) @concealeddarkness13 (the picture for her is made by the wonderful @drabbleitout, and she is the person on the left with the prosthetics in the picture): Chess is a special character, and I hope to show how special and awesome she is! She’s extremely distrustful, but she’ll trust people who even treat her with an ounce of decency, and she’ll protect the people she cares about with her life. She’s flirty and confident, but underneath, she has an abysmal amount of self esteem and thinks she’s a monster that will never have love or friendships. She is my blorbo who has been rotating in my mind for the past two years, and I hope you can love her as well! Someone described her in one of the AUs I’ve done as oscillating “between being a poor, wet little meow meow and a fierce feral protective lioness being held back by the scruff of her neck because she is still little”. (credits to @ratracechronicler)

She did start out with a loving family, but like all good protagonists, her parents were murdered when she was 10, and she was left alone. Especially because the society she lives in ignores violent crimes and the victims of those crimes, erasing them all from society as if they never existed. So, she technically didn’t exist in society’s eyes, so she couldn’t get a job or own property or anything. The people around her helped her for a few years until she was old enough to take care of herself, and then she learned to steal.

At twenty years old, she was kidnapped and forced into prosthetics experiments that gave her fire magic that hurts her, from her prosthetic right arm and left leg now. She has a magic fire in her lungs that flares up during physical or mental stress and burns her throat and makes her cough up smoke. Aeflin, the person running the experiments, believed her to be very strong (because she snarked at Aeflin so much and didn’t let her see her pain as much as possible), so she decided to make Chess into her weapon.

She changed her name (since Chess’s original name was Ezra) to Chess, and she put her through even worse torture. Finally, Naivi, the other person running the experiments, got Chess her own team and sent her out into the world to do what the experiments were for and to get her away from Aeflin.

Chess tried to escape that, but a random person found her and took away her memories and brought her back into the enclosure, where most humans are trapped. And she realized right away that the humans inside the enclosure found she was from the experiments and hated her and hurt her and called her a monster because God forbid women do anything (just trying to survive). She learned that the only way that she could get a warm place to sleep (not an alley) was to make herself attractive to people and flirt. She liked sleeping with people, but she mostly did it to have a warm and somewhat safer place to sleep. And even then, she’d have to stay alert because her partner could wake up and try to hurt her.

That’s where she is at the start of her story! She will get a found family and someone or someones to love! She’s pansexual and polyamorous and flirty, and she loves physical touch! She just wants people to treat her decently, and if she has to, she’ll fight to protect her boundaries. And she loves punching jerks in the face with her prosthetic! And we love a woman who loves to fight, right? Thanks for reading!

Crislie Crimsworth (she/her) @gailynovelry: The story of Crislie’s life is that she followed a really sad, really pretty girl out of her sleepy little village and got several new scars, a case of lycanthropy, a little bit of god-killing, and lots of trauma out of it. But she did get a girlfriend and a sick ax along the way, so it balances out! Since “sunset orange” is a mourning color in her country, she’s also a casual goth as well as a jock. If you become her friend then she will carry you around like a sack of potatoes and sometimes hand you a little carved wooden animal. I love her dearly.

Nat Finch (he/him) @albatris: I'd like to submit Nat Finch! he/him, 25 years old, brand new baby vampire. he works the night shift at dodgy petrol and convenience store Stop 'N' Go, where he falls asleep on the clock and encourages shoplifting. he's schizotypal like me and he loves cats, cooking, and his friends! he's the protagonist of my campy gory horror trilogy, though he'd rather not be!

he's short and fat with red eyes and lots of freckles. his hair is long and black, often uneven and choppy in length, because he just cuts tangles out instead of untangling them ❤

he's a sweet boy, earnest boy, awkward boy; he doesn't have many friends at the start of the story due to his paranoia, psychosis, and social anxiety, but by the end of it has a whole bunch of good friends AND a kitty he adores named Grub who purrs like a faulty tractor

in this story vampirism is a sentient entity and all connected via a hivemind known as "the Garble".... it lives in the vampires' blood and can manipulate their thoughts as well as give them heightened strength and speed, claws and fangs, and night vision when they need it. it can be useful, but mostly it's a bully and an inconvenience

at the centre of the Garble hivemind lives the very first vampire, an undead rotting corpse and the god of vampires, and a few of their close friends and confidants. all life force collected by regular vampires flows to them at the centre and grants them immortality and power. it's a sweet deal for the folks at the centre, and a terrible deal for ordinary vampires like Nat who rarely reap any real benefits from their condition, but are threatened and manipulated into participating in this system regardless

Nat's story sees him struggling to solve the mystery of how and why he was turned and trying to balance his kind, caring nature with his new violent condition... and eventually leads him to, "hey, I think I'm going to hunt down and eat the rest of vampire god"

good for him!

some other Nat Facts:

huge drama queen (will play up being sad and pathetic to get what he wants)

vampires are hardwired to seek warmth and coziness so Nat is always down to snuggle 24/7

bouncy cheery overexcited lad who will grin for weeks if you say something nice to him

vegetarian, aside from eating people, which he insists does not count

speaking of eating people, primarily preys on rich pricks and abusive bosses

is too awkward to tell his neighbours he bought them a cute knitted blanket he thought they might like for their corgi because what if that's a weird thing to do. this has been going on for three weeks

is too awkward to tell his neighbours his name is Nat, not Matt. this has been going on for three years

has a giant scary monster mode full of eyes and teeth >:3

please consider voting for my boy!

#oc poll tournament #round 3 #oc: chess #oc: Crislie Crimsworth #oc: Nat Finch

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best-underrated-anime · 1 year ago

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Best Underrated Anime Group L Round 1: #L4 vs #L5

#L4: Comedians make comedy

Follows the conversations of five rakugo storyteller girls relating the odd things that happen to them each day. Their comedic and satirical chatting covers all kinds of topics, from pointless observations of everyday life, to politics, manga, and more. Each girl has something new to add to the discussion, and the discourse never ends in the same place it began.

Each of the rakugo girls has their own unique personality, with the energetic but immature Marii Buratei; the seemingly cute Kigurumi Haroukitei; the inherently lucky and carefree Tetora Bouhatei; the calm and violent Gankyou Kuurubiyuutei; and the pessimistic and unstable Kukuru Anrakutei. These girls—and their mysterious friend in a wrestling mask—give their observations to the audience, either backstage at the rakugo theater or in various famous locations around Tokyo.

#L5: Underground boxer loves vampire doctor (BL)

After losing his parents at a young age, Mignon lives as a mechanic by day and a cage fighter by night at an illegal arena. Living a life of exploitation and violence, the only person who gives him any attention is Oh Young-One, the resident doctor at the arena.

Despite accidentally discovering Young-One’s true identity, Mignon continues to love him, and it’s this pure kind of love that lets Young-One slowly open his heart. But when the hellish reality surrounding Mignon starts threatening the stability of Young-One’s life, can these two ever find happiness?

Titles, propagandas, trailers, and poll under the cut!

#L4: Joshiraku

youtube

Propaganda 1:

All the girls have fun personalities, and it puts some light on a form of Japanese traditional storytelling. It’s also the origin of the April 40th meme image.

Propaganda 2:

It’s hilarious! Genuinely one of the funniest comedy anime I’ve seen. The characters are all ridiculous and the bits almost all land perfectly. Mostly. Some of the bits require too much knowledge of Japanese language or culture to make any sense translated, but that’s not too many. My favorite character is Gan. I love the joke where she’s the “glasses girl” and so everyone assumes she’s meek and nerdy, but she’s actually super-violent.

The animation is also really good and gets absolutely ridiculous at points. There’s even a recurring meta joke where one character will complain about how hard the animators are working while being ABSURDLY over-animated. The standard structure of the skits is that the characters will start by having a conversation littered with puns, and then things escalated to a jungle shoot-out or crazy slapstick or a ninja battle or the characters talking politics. You never know, and it’s great.

Trigger Warnings: None.

#L5: Mignon

Propaganda:

Mignon is an independently-made BL aeni (Korean anime). There are only 12 episodes, and each is around 5 minutes long, except for the last one. Watching everything is like watching a short film, and not just because of the length, but also because of its quality.

The story is really short, so I can’t talk much about the plot without spoiling everything. But if you’re already into yaoi manhuas, then I can say that the plot is quite basic. The execution, however, is top-notch. Mignon takes a simple premise and brings out the best in it.

Characters are few but focused. Although there isn’t much time to delve deep into them, we are given enough info to care for them. The voice acting is also lovely. I don’t really watch aeni, and I haven’t watched KDramas in years, so I thought it would take me a while to get used to animated characters speaking in Korean. But surprisingly, after the first episode, it no longer bothered me. The voice actors did a good job in portraying the personalities of each character that I was quickly immersed into the story.

Then, there’s the use of color. The colors are purposeful and contributes to the atmosphere of each scene and also hints at us the significance of the place—loud, vibrant colors for the noisy arena, calm whites in the clinic where Mignon first found solace in Young-One, drab blues and greys in Young-One’s apartment where he’s lived alone for years, etc. And oh, don’t get me started on the scene direction/arrangement. It’s amazing how the creators can make every episode impactful despite having only around 5 minutes for each of them. Episode 10, especially, is a cinematic masterpiece.

Lastly, the music. There’s a lot of 80s synth-pop vibes, and I just love it.

Honestly, even if you don’t end up voting for Mignon, just go ahead and watch it. It only takes about an hour, and you won’t regret it.

Trigger Warnings: Mignon is abused by his coach. Lots of scenes that involve blood, but nothing too gore-y. Episode 10, however, has TOO much blood.

NSFW Warning: There’s an explicit sex scene. The parts are pixelated, but it doesn’t really leave much to the imagination. Also lots of tongue kissing.

If you’re reblogging and adding your own propaganda, please tag me @best-underrated-anime so that I’ll be sure to see it.

#flashing #<- tag added for 2nd trailer #anime #aeni #best underrated anime #polls #poll tournament #tournament #anime tournament #animation #animated show #group stage #group stage round 1 #tournament polls #korean anime #group l #joshiraku #mignon #민용

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morally-grey-girlbosses · 1 year ago

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Propaganda under the cut.

Lappland Saluzzo:

What if Goro Majima was an Italian wolf girl, and also a lesbian? Lappland is a disgraced mafia assassin who hates the famiglia for how they've ruined her country and hurt countless people for the sake of the egos of a few old men. She thinks organized crime is inescapable, though, so her rebellion is to pick fights with other mafioso to justify killing them brutally as possible. She believes turning herself into a violent wild card the leadership is afraid of will stop them from treating her as a person they think they can control. The only person she truly respects is her old rival/childhood friend who DID manage to escape the mafia, whichs fuels Lappland's extremely homoerotic obsession with her that includes at least two duels to the death. At one point her rival is arrested on suspicion of murder, so Lappland visits her in jail to chat and hand-feeds her chocolate through the bars of her cell (it's intentionally her least favourite flavour). The next day she crashes a semitruck into the courthouse in the middle of a hearing to take credit for a car bomb assassination the she didn't do to keep her rival from being falsely convicted. Lappland is the toxic girl shonen rival that tumblr keeps saying they want.

Avrana Kern:

First of all, read Children of Time its great. Avrana Kern was the one of the greatest scientists of old Earth, she spearheaded a project to terraform other planets a principal part of which would be sending down a "barrel of monkeys" armed with a virus to encourage their evolution towards sapience to do a lot of the legwork so the planet would eventually be ready for human colonisation, so great morally grey girlbossing there we can all agree creating new forms of slavery, to her credit she does actually care more about her monkeys than she does other humans but still #Girlboss am I right? Anyway she was caustic, she was blunt nobody liked her but she got the job done what a girlboss. Until an anti technology cult managed to spread a computer virus that destroyed all technology just as the project was beginning the final stages, destroying her barrel of monkeys before if could reach the planet below, Kern was the sole survivor managing to jettison herself from the main station and get into a stasis pod.

Over milennia her body even in stasis began to degenerate until she was more or less fused to the pod, more AI than human. Also spiders get the evolutionary virus and began to develop sapience and a society. The last survivors of humanity arrive on their last ditch colony ship the Gilgamesh and Kern awakens from her slumber, she refuses to acknowledge the humans aboard as human and say the planet below belongs to her monkeys (as we have covered there were no monkeys below, only spiders) and she'll destroy them with her advanced pre collapse of humanity tech if they try to land, they're forced to leave #Girlboss am i right? Eventually the spiders get high enough on the technology ladder to get in touch with her and she basically sets up as their god but she doesn't understand they're spiders, not monkeys so there's a big disconnect there, there's some religious wars done its not a great time in spider society its mostly her fault we gotta say but #Girlboss am I right? Eventually the message gets across that they're spiders not monkeys and she has a bit of a breakdown gets downgraded from god but still very influential in spider culture.

Anyway eventually the spiders develop spaceflight, the spider astronaut chapter is the best its so good, and bring her down to the planet, she now runs on an Ant based operating system and doubles as an AI for the starships created by the spiders. Trust me it all checks out please read Children of Time. This is only stuff from the first book she does more morally grey girlbossing in Children of Ruin and Children of Memory but I won't go into those, have some air of mystery going forwards.

#poll #tournament poll #round 1 #lappland saluzzo #arknights #avrana kern #children of time

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gentle-giant-swag · 1 year ago

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Least gentle giant, round 1 battle 5

Anti propaganda

Character W

Technically does mass murder for work amd is good at it, also must save some people for work but is so so bad at it, pushed his ex-boss right into raging volcano by kicking him in the face, killed oh so many dogs, was kicked out of US air forces (questionable misdeed actually), also does terrible job in witness protection (1 baby saved, 1 bulgarian village obliterated, charges kidnapped, dead and/or turned to magical dust), absent brother.

Character U

He has killed many people violently, including execution on behalf of an oppressive government; he has ratted out a friend basically for a plan she was part of to run away from a dangerous place and political situation; he was only friends with her to begin with to spy on her; he has conspired against his own father and undermined his government and seized power.

DO NOT reveal the character if you know who they are!

#gentle giant swag #least gentle giant #tumblr tournament #tumblr poll #fandom poll #polls #I love polls #tumblr bracket #tumblr tourney #tourney #bracket

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theshedding · 4 years ago

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Lil Nas X: Country Music, Christianity & Reclaiming HELL

I don’t typically bother myself to follow what Lil Nas X is doing from day to day, or even month to month but I do know that his “Old Town Road” hit became one of the biggest selling/streamed records in Country Music Business history (by a Black Country & Queer artist). “Black” is key because for 75+ years Country music has unsuspiciously evolved into a solidly White-identified genre (despite mixed and Indian & Black roots). Regrettably, Country music is also widely known for anti-black, misogynoir, reliably homophobic (Trans isn’t really a conversation yet), Christian and Hard Right sentiments on the political spectrum. Some other day I will venture into more; there is a whole analysis dying to be done on this exclusive practice in the music industry with its implications on ‘access’ to equity and opportunity for both Black/POC’s and Whites artists/songwriters alike. More commentary on this rigid homogeneous field is needed and how it prohibits certain talent(s) for the sake of perpetuating homogeneity (e.g. “social determinants” of diversity & viable artistic careers). I’ll refrain from discussing that fully here, though suffice it to say that for those reasons X’s “Old Town Road” was monumental and vindicating.

As for Lil Nas X, I’m not particularly a big fan of his music; but I see him, what he’s doing, his impact on music + culture and I celebrate him using these moments to affirm his Black, Queer self, and lifting up others. Believe it or not, even in the 2020′s, being “out” in the music business is still a costly choice. As an artist it remains much easier to just “play straight”. And despite appearances, the business (particularly Country) has been dragged kicking and screaming into developing, promoting and advancing openly-affirming LGBTQ 🏳️‍🌈 artists in the board room or on-stage. Though things are ‘better’ we have not yet arrived at a place of equity or opportunity for queer artists; for the road of music biz history is littered with stunted careers, bodies and limitations on artists who had no option but to follow conventional ways, fail or never be heard of in the first place. With few exceptions, record labels, radio and press/media have successfully used fear, intimidation, innuendo and coercion to dilute, downplay or erase any hint of queer identity from its performers. This was true even for obvious talents like Little Richard.

(Note: I’m particularly speaking of artists in this regard, not so much the hairstylists, make-up artists, PA’s, etc.)

_____

Which is why...in regard to Lil Nas X, whether you like, hate or love his music, the young brother is a trailblazer. His very existence protests (at least) decades of inequity, oppression and erasure. X aptly critiques a Neo-Christian Fascist Heteropatriarchy; not just in American society but throughout the Music Business and with Black people. That is no small deal. His unapologetic outness holds a mirror up to Christianity at-large, as an institution, theology and practice. The problem is they just don’t like what they see in that mirror.

In actuality, “Call Me By Your Name”, Lil Nas X’s new video, is a twist on classic mythology and religious memes that are less reprehensible or vulgar than the Biblical narratives most of us grew up on vís-a-vís indoctrinating smiles of Sunday school teachers and family prior to the “age of reason”. Think about the narratives blithely describing Satan’s friendly wager with God regarding Job (42:1-6); the horrific “prophecies” in St. John’s Book of Revelation (i.e. skies will rain fire, angels will spit swords, mankind will be forced to retreat into caves for shelter, and we will be harassed by at least three terrifying dragons and beasts. Angels will sound seven trumpets of warning, and later on, seven plagues will be dumped on the world), or Jesus’s own clarifying words of violent intent in Matthew (re: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” 10:34). Whether literal or metaphor, these age old stories pale in comparison to a three minute allegorical rap video. Conservatives: say what you will, I’m pretty confident X doesn’t take himself as seriously as “The true and living God” from the book of Job.

A little known fact as it is, people have debunked the story and evolution of Satan and already offered compelling research showing [he] is more of a literary device than an actual entity or “spirit” (Spoiler: In the Bible, Satan does not take shape as an actual “bad” person until the New Testament). In fact, modern Christianity’s impression of the “Devil” is shaped by conflating Hellenized mythology with a literary tradition rooted in Dante’s Inferno and accompanying spooks and superstitions going back thousands of years. Whether Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Scientologist, Atheist or Agnostic, we’ve spent a lifetime with these predominant icons and clichés. (Resource: Prof. Bart D. Erhman, “Heaven & Hell”).

So Here’s THE PROBLEM: The current level of fear and outrage is:

(1) Unjust, imposing and irrational.

(2) Disproportionate when taken into account a lifetime of harmful Christian propaganda, anti-gay preaching and political advocacy.

(3) Historically inaccurate concerning the existence of “Hell” and who should be scared of going there.

Think I’m overreacting?

Examples:

Institutionalized Homophobia (rhetoric + policy)

Anti-Gay Ministers In Life And Death: Bishop Eddie Long And Rev. Bernice King

Black, gay and Christian, Marylanders struggle with Conflicts

Harlem pastor: 'Obama has released the homo demons on the black man'

Joel Olsteen: Homosexuality is “Not God’s Best”

Bishop Brandon Porter: Gays “Perverted & Lost...The Church of God in Christ Convocation appears like a ‘coming out party’ for members of the gay community.”

Kim Burrell: “That perverted homosexual spirit is a spirit of delusion & confusion and has deceived many men & women, and it has caused a strain on the body of Christ”

Falwell Suggests Gays to Blame for 9-11 Attacks

Pope Francis Blames The Devil For Sexual Abuse By Catholic Church

Pope Francis: Gay People Not Welcome in Clergy

Pope Francis Blames The Devil For Sexual Abuse By Catholic Church

The Pope and Gay People: Nothing’s Changed

The Catholic church silently lobbied against a suicide prevention hotline in the US because it included LGBT resources

Mormon church prohibits Children of LGBT parents to be baptized

Catholic Charity Ends Adoptions Rather Than Place Kid With Same-Sex Couple

I Was a Religious Zealot That Hurt People-Coming Out as Gay: A Former Conversion Therapy Leader Is Apologizing to the LGBTQ Community

The above short list chronicles a consistent, literal, demonization of LGBTQ people, contempt for their gender presentation, objectification of their bodies/sexuality and a coordinated pollution of media and culture over the last 50+ years by clergy since integration and Civil Rights legislation. Basically terrorism. Popes, Bishops, Pastors, Evangelists, Politicians, Television hosts, US Presidents, Camp Leaders, Teachers, Singers & Entertainers, Coaches, Athletes and Christians of all types all around the world have confused and confounded these issues, suppressed dissent, and confidently lied about LGBT people-including fellow Queer Christians with impunity for generations (i.e. “thou shall not bear false witness against they neighbor” Ex. 23:1-3). Christian majority viewpoints about “laws” and “nature” have run the table in discussions about LGBTQ people in society-so much that we collectively must first consider their religious views in all discussions and the specter of Christian approval -at best or Christian condescension -at worst. That is Christian (and straight) privilege. People are tired of this undue deference to religious opinions.

That is what is so deliciously bothersome about Lil Nas X being loud, proud and “in your face” about his sexuality. If for just a moment, he not only disrupts the American hetero-patriarchy but specifically the Black hetero-patriarchy, the so-called “Black Church Industrial Complex”, Neo-Christian Fascism and a mostly uneducated (and/or miseducated) public concerning Ancient Near East and European history, superstitions-and (by extension) White Supremacy. To round up: people are losing their minds because the victim decided to speak out against his victimizer.

Additionally, on some level I believe people are mad at him being just twenty years old, out and FREE as a self-assured, affirming & affirmed QUEER Black male entertainer with money and fame in the PRIME of his life. We’ve never, or rarely, seen that before in a Black man in the music business and popular culture. But that’s just too bad for them. With my own eyes I’ve watched straight people, friends, Christians, enjoy their sexuality from their elementary youth to adolescence, up and through college and later marriages, often times independently of their spouses (repeatedly). Meanwhile Queer/Gay/SGL/LGBTQ people are expected to put their lives on hold while the ‘blessed’ straight people run around exploring premarital/post-marital/extra-marital sex, love and affection, unbound & un-convicted by their “sin” or God...only to proudly rebrand themselves later in life as a good, moral “wholesome Christian” via the ‘sacred’ institution of marriage with no questions asked.

Inequality defined.

For Lil Nas X, everything about the society we've created for him in the last 100+ years (re: links above) has explicitly been designed for his life not to be his own. According to these and other Christians (see above), his identity is essentially supposed to be an endless rat fuck of internal confusion, suicide-ideation, depression, long-suffering, faux masculinity, heterosexism, groveling towards heaven, respectability politics, failed prayer and supplication to a heteronormative earthly and celestial hierarchy unbothered in affording LGBT people like him a healthy, sane human development. It’s almost as if the Conservative establishment (Black included) needs Lil Nas X to be like others before him: “private”, mysteriously single, suicidal, suspiciously straight or worse, dead of HIV/AIDS ...anything but driving down the street enjoying his youth as a Black Queer artist and man. So they mad about that?

Well those days are over.

-Rogiérs is a writer, international recording artist, performer and indie label manager with 25+ years in the music industry. He also directs Black Nonbelievers of DC, a non-profit org affiliated with the AHA supporting Black skeptics, Atheists, Agnostics & Humanists. He holds a B.A. in Music Business & Mgmt and a M.A. in Global Entertainment & Music Business from Berklee College of Music and Berklee Valencia, Spain. www.FibbyMusic.net Twitter/IG: @Rogiers1

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chiseler · 4 years ago

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The Second Most Dangerous Anarchist in America

{NOTE: September 16th, 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the Wall Street bombing, an event which the city, for some reason, refuses to commemorate.}

A little after two on the afternoon of April 15th, 1920, the paymaster of one of the two shoe factories in Braintree, MA, together with a security guard, decided in a change of pace to simply walk that week’s payroll the few blocks from the office to the factory. The payroll, a little over $15,000 in cash, was divided between two strongboxes, each carried by one of the men. Along the way, and in front of over fifty eyewitnesses, a gang of five men, strangers to the small town, gunned down the paymaster and the guard, grabbed the strongboxes, hopped into an idling blue Buick, and sped away. The Buick, later determined to have been stolen a few weeks earlier, was a fancy model with curtained windows, plenty of chrome, and fat tires.

Two days later, on April 17th, two men on horseback discovered the car abandoned in the woods along the western edges of Bridgewater, just a couple miles south of Braintree. Much thinner tire tracks leading away from the scene were assumed to belong to the car into which the killers piled after ditching the Buick.

Bridgwater’s police chief, Michael Stewart, was a cigar-chomping, two-fisted type who’d been raised in Boston. Despite being the son of Irish immigrants, Stewart harbored a deep distrust of more recent immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Italy, especially the political types, suspecting them of being responsible for most of the crime in the region. He was proud to have been able to turn over six bona-fide Reds living in Bridgewater during the Palmer raids of the previous year.

Upon hearing about the Braintree killing, Stewart was reminded of a similar attempted heist in Bridgewater four months earlier on Christmas Eve. Again a shoe factory payroll had been targeted by a group of armed men in a getaway car. That time, however, they were thwarted when the truck containing the payroll crashed, and the would-be thieves were blocked by a passing trolley. Frustrated, they hopped back into the getaway car, another fancy, recently stolen model, and fled empty-handed.

During his abortive investigation into the failed heist, Stewart had been pointed to a ramshackle two-story house in the woods. Locals referred to it as Puffer’s Place, and believed it was home to a group of Italian anarchists. Those who’d heard of Puffer’s Place had no idea what went on there, but if it was full of anarchists, you knew it couldn’t be good. It sounded like a promising lead—Stewart was convinced Italian anarchists were responsible for the job—but he wasn’t able to find the shack, and gave up on the investigation.

All that changed a day after the Braintree attack, when Stewart received a call from the immigration bureau asking after one Feruccio Coacci, a known anarchist who lived in the area and was scheduled for deportation.

Coacci, who’d been living with his wife and a housemate at Puffer’s Place, was quickly tracked down and deported on the 19th. In fact, after weeks of delays and excuses, he insisted on being deported on the 19th. Upon learning Coacci had coincidentally worked at both targeted shoe factories, and just as coincidentally failed to show up for work the day of both heists, Stewart became suspicious. On Tuesday the 20th, he headed back out to Puffer’s Place with another investigator.

They were met at the door by a small, funny-looking man who introduced himself as Mike Boda. Bona invited them in, showed them around, and answered their questions. He even showed them his revolver. Coacci, he said, had some friends who were anarchists and very bad men, but he had nothing to do with them himself.

When they were done looking around the cluttered house, Bona led them to the dilapidated car barn out back, explaining his car, a clunky 1914 Overland, was in the shop to get its magneto repaired. Although Overlands had very thin tires, there were also fatter tire tracks on the garage’s dirt floor. Buda explained this away by telling the officers he sometimes pulled in at a funny angle.

Satisfied, Stewart thanked Mr. Voda for his time and cooperation, and left.

Realizing later what a horrible mistake he’d made, that the tire tracks were just the clue he needed, Stewart rushed back to Puffer’s Place the next morning, arriving on the front stoop about twenty seconds after Bona slipped out the back door and vanished. By the next day, when Stewart stopped by again hoping to find Buda, Puffer’s Place had been cleaned out.

A few people at the time described him as resembling a clown without makeup. He was short and balding, with a great bulbous nose poised above a black mustache. But Mario Buda was not a man known for his rollicking sense of humor. Those who knew him said he was quiet, serious, enigmatic and a little arrogant. Still, there was something of the clown about him. At least he took his slapstick very, very seriously. Instead of cream pies or seltzer bottles, however, he leaned more toward dynamite. Now, a century after his most famous performance, he’s become the stuff of myth, both in anarchist and law enforcement circles.

Buda was born on October 13th, 1884 in Savignano sul Rubicone, Italy, a region known at the time as a hotbed of anarchist thinking.

In 1907, after a few minor scrapes with the law and an increasing sense he’d never be able to make a go of it in Savignano, a then-23-year-old Buda sailed to America. Although already an avowed anarchist, Buda had also apprenticed as a shoemaker, a skill he hoped might come in handy in the land of plenty. It didn’t, and after working a series of menial jobs, starving and getting nowhere for two years, he returned to Italy in 1911. In 1913, he decided to give America another shot, this time settling in Boston and finding work at (depending on the account) a shoe factory, a hat factory or, together with his brother, a shop that sold cleaning supplies. That same year he became friends with another shoemaker named Nicola Sacco, whom he met when both took part in a protest at a nearby textile factory. Along with being a shoemaker, Sacco was also an anarchist, a follower of Luigi Galleani. In the pages of his magazine, Cronaca Sovversiva, Galleani advocated what he called The Propaganda of the Deed, which called for the violent annihilation of all government institutions through a relentless program of bombings and assassinations. Although the magazine never had more than 5,000 subscribers, it was considered the most influential anarchist periodical in America, while Justice Department insiders had labeled Galleani himself, who lived in Barre, Vermont, the country’s most dangerous anarchist.

Buda began attending local Galleanisti meetings where, sometime around 1916, he also met a fish peddler named Bartolomeo Vanzetti. He would later cite Sacco and Vanzetti as two of his best friends in the world.

The image of the swarthy, bomb-tossing anarchist in a long dark coat and low-slung hat solidly entered the American popular consciousness in 1919 (see below), but anarchist bombings across the country were not that uncommon prior to 1919, and in fact can be traced back to at least the Haymarket Square bombing of 1886. Still, there’s something so simple, even comforting and Romantic, in attributing all these incidents to a single figure, a lone super villain with a taste for black powder. Apart from a few scattered basic facts, precious little is known about Buda. He gave no speeches, left no writings, never married, played things very close to the chest, yet still seemed to be everywhere in the country at once. Over the past century this mysterious little man with the big nose has become as prime a candidate as anyone for supervillain status.

So this is where the speculation begins, most of it based on hindsight which itself is based on speculation.

On New Years Day, 1916, a security guard at the Massachusetts State house discovered a wicker suitcase packed with dynamite in the building’s basement, but was able to dispose of it before it went off. The following day another bomb planted in nearby Woburn was a bit more successful, detonating inside a factory belonging to The New England Manufacturing Company. No one was hurt, but the building suffered extensive damage. Was Buda involved in either incident? It’s unknown, and in fact it’s fairly unlikely, but in recent years armchair radical historians have been including them as possible early examples of Buda’s handiwork.

Seven months later on July 22nd, as America began prepping to dive into World War I, cities across the country staged what were called Preparedness Day parades to express public support for the military. Radical and labor groups assailed the idea, not only because they saw it merely as a cheap excuse for large businesses to angle their way into fat government contracts, but also because part of what was termed preparedness was the institution of a new military draft which would mostly, if not exclusively, affect the working class.

The parade in San Francisco, which attracted an estimated 50,000 marchers, was thrown into chaos when a suitcase packed with dynamite and left on the sidewalk exploded. Ten people were killed, and another forty were sent to the hospital with serious injuries. Suspicion immediately focused on socialists, labor groups, subversives and other radicals. The local chamber of commerce and business leaders, happy to cooperate with the police, compiled a list of known labor agitators who’d been involved in recent strikes. They passed the list over to the cops, who started rounding up Reds. In the end Warren Billings and Tom Mooney, both of them low-level labor activists, were charged with the bombing. Both men had solid alibis, both had been out of town that day, but thanks to the testimony of one well-coached prosecution witness, Billings got life, and Mooney was sentenced to death.

In the uproar that followed, Billings and Mooney became poster boys, early martyrs for the labor movement, but, twenty years later, received full pardons. That still left the question, who built and planted the crude bomb? Assuming it was the work of anarchists and not German saboteurs, every notable anarchist in the country—beginning with Emma Goldman—fell under suspicion, with the smart money leaning toward Boda. There exists no evidence linking him to the explosion, but there was no evidence linking anyone to the explosion, so whose to say it wasn’t a Buda job? The case remains unsolved to this day.

Later in 1916—and this we do know—Buda was arrested at a Boston anti-militarism protest that turned violent. At his hearing, like so many anarchists at the time, he refused to take the oath on a Bible, and was sentenced to five months in jail for contempt. Upon his release in early 1917, and hoping to avoid that newly-instituted draft, he reconnected with Sacco and Vanzetti and the trio spirited away to join a growing collective of Italian anarchists living in Monterey, Mexico.

There, Buda worked in a laundry and—here we’re back to speculation—may have spent his free time honing his bomb-making skills. What evidence there is to support this idea came later in 1917.

On November 9th, a Milwaukee, WI-based Italian evangelical minister, fed up with these slacker anarchists giving speeches badmouthing America when the country was at war, held a loyalty rally in front of the city’s anarchist headquarters. A fight broke out, the police were called, and in the end two anarchists were shot and killed. In retaliation, a group of ten anarchists, Buda among them, left Mexico and returned to the States with a mission. On the night of November 23rd, they left a bag containing a bomb in the basement of the offending evangelical church. Before it detonated, however, it was discovered by a janitor, who brought it to the local police station.

That’s where it exploded, killing nine cops and one civilian. Although several anarchists, including Buda, were rounded up and questioned, there was no solid evidence against any of them, and they were all released. No charges were ever filed. Today the Milwaukee blast is generally accepted without question as a Buda operation.

Buda, who upon his return from Mexico adopted the pseudonym Mike Boda, moved back to Massachusetts in early 1918. His precise whereabouts and doings over the course of the next two years remain foggy, though a few people think they know what he might’ve been up to.

On the afternoon of April 29th, 1919, a small package wrapped in brown paper arrived in the mail at the home of Georgia senator Thomas W. Hardwick. Hardwick wasn’t home, so his housekeeper brought the box inside and, together with Hardwick’s wife, set about opening it at the kitchen table.

The package turned out to be a novelty sampler from Gimbel’s. Or so the box claimed, anyway. When the housekeeper tore open the flap marked “OPEN,” she unwittingly released a spring that allowed a small vial of acid to spill on three blasting caps, which detonated the stick of dynamite packed in the wooden box. The explosion blew off the housekeeper’s hands and left Hardwick’s wife badly burned and lacerated.

That same day, an identical package arrived at the home of Rayme Weston Finch, a Bureau of Investigation agent with the Justice Department. One of Finch’s staffers took the initiative and opened the curious package, but ignoring the clearly-marked instructions, opened it from the wrong end. The acid vial merely tumbled out onto the table, and the bomb didn’t detonate.

After these two incidents, law enforcement departments, the post office and the media all began posting nationwide warnings about any similar packages. Even before word started to spread, a sharp-eyed postal clerk in New York had already set aside over a dozen identical packages for lack of postage. A total of thirty-six bombs had been mailed around the end of April, apparently in the hope they would be received and opened on May Day. Scanning the list of those politicians, judges, law enforcement officials, wealthy businessmen and newspaper editors who’d been targeted—including J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer—gave investigators a reasonably clear insight into the motivations of the Mad Bomber.

In a paranoid frenzy following the Bolshevik Revolution, city, state, and federal governments passed a series of sweeping anti-immigrant and anti-sedition laws, making it all but illegal to be an outspoken socialist, communist or anarchist, especially if you also happened to be Italian. All those people slated to receive mail bombs had either supported or enforced the legislation. Fisk, for instance, lead a raid on the offices of Cronaca Sovversiva in 1918, arresting three Galleanisti. Hardwick, meanwhile, had sponsored legislation aimed at crushing the labor movement and driving Left-leaning immigrants (mostly Italians) out of the country.

Two thoughts at this point. First, if Boda built the bombs in question, and if it was his idea to disguise an exploding box as a “Gimbel’s Novelty Sampler,” then he clearly had a much wackier sense of humor than most people realize. And second, again if Boda was responsible for the bombs used in the April campaign, they represented a marked leap forward in design. The earlier bombs attributed to him had been crude devices, just bundles of dynamite with primitive timing mechanisms, while these mail bombs were sophisticated and intricate. So who knows? Maybe he really had honed his skills during those months in Mexico.

On June 2nd, as federal investigators were still trying to narrow down their list of suspects for April’s mail bombs, eight much more powerful bombs, once again targeting judges, politicians and Attorney General Palmer, were detonated simultaneously in cities across the country. Bombs went off in Pittsburgh, Washington, New York and Chicago. Along with being packed with metallic shrapnel, each of the devices also contained a leaflet which read:

War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.

The flyers had been signed “The American Anarchist Fighters.”

This time there were two casualties. One was a night watchman, the other the former editor of Cronaca Sovversiva, who was in the process of depositing a 25-pound bomb on Palmer’s front steps when it prematurely exploded. The bomb demolished the front of the house, but Palmer, who was at home with his family at the time, was in a back room and remained unharmed. The bomber, meanwhile, was scattered in small pieces all over the genteel Washington, D.C. neighborhood.

Combined with the flyers, when the bomber was eventually identified as a Galleanista the feds had all the evidence they needed to deport Luigi Galleani back to Italy. But that was only the beginning of Attorney General Palmer’s revenge.

Although no one was ever arrested or charged for the bombing campaign, toward the end of 1919, the Attorney General, a long-time hardliner when it came to immigration, Sedition, labor unions an radicalism, launched what came to be known as The Palmer Raids. Cops across the country (including Police Chief Stewart in Bridgwater) rounded up roughly 10,000 suspected anarchists, communists and socialists, most of them Italian. In the end over 500 were deported. Meanwhile, American intellectuals whose own political views edged into the pink found themselves subject to federal and local suspicion and persecution. While the Palmer raids only lasted a few months, the first Red Scare would linger much longer.

Sacco and Vanzetti

On the evening of May 5th, 1920, two weeks after Mike Boda slipped away from Police Chief Michael Stewart, word began to spread the cops were going to start rounding up local radicals in their as yet fruitless search for the men responsible for the Braintree and Bridgwater crimes. Members of the local Galleanisti cell, including Sacco, Vanzetti, and Boda, decided it might be wise to quickly dispose of any stray dynamite and anarchist literature anyone might have laying around their homes. It was also decided the best and most efficient way to do this would be by car. Boda had the only available car, and though it was still in the shop, it was ready to be picked up. Boda, Sacco, Vanzetti and another friend made their way to the mechanic’s house about nine, but when the mechanic and his wife made a hamfisted attempt to stall them, it became clear something was afoot. Boda correctly smelled a set-up, and told the mechanic he’d come to pick up his car the next morning instead. The four men quickly left, splitting up as they did so.

Boda went into hiding in East Boston, but on their way home on the trolley that night, Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up by a cop who considered them suspicious characters. The pistols they were carrying and all the anarchist pamphlets in their respective homes only strengthened Stewart’s belief he had two of the killers in custody.

While keeping a very low profile in Boston, Boda closely followed the growing case against his two friends in the local papers. On September 11th, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were officially indicted on first-degree murder charges.

Five days later, a little before noon on September 16th, as the sidewalk began to fill with the lunch hour crowds, a man drove his old horse and cart down Wall Street, coming to a stop outside the corporate headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank, just down the street from the Stock Exchange. The man, whom nobody would later recall seeing, climbed down, tied up the horse, and strolled away, one would like to imagine with his hands in his pockets and whistling a casual tune. Nobody paid much attention to the horse and cart, a common sight around New York at the time. Besides, everyone was too focused on lunch and that afternoon’s business meetings.

At a minute after twelve, the hundred pounds of dynamite packed in the cart exploded, sending nails and 500 pounds of iron sash weights ripping into the junior executives, bank tellers, secretaries, stock brokers and office boys who filled the streets. Cars were tossed around like cheap toys, trolleys a block away were blown off the tracks and windows throughout the financial district were shattered, as a fiery mushroom cloud arose above the gaping hole where the horse and cart once sat.

The streets and sidewalks were littered with broken glass, bleeding bodies, and parts of bodies as an eerie silence fell over the area. Then the screaming began.. In the end, thirty-eight people were killed, with another 300 hospitalized.

William Flynn, director of the Bureau of Investigation, insisted on handling the case himself, ordering the immediate arrest of any known anarchists and, for good measure, the IWW’s Big Bill Haywood, who was in Chicago at the time of the bombing. Along with Haywood, eleven anarchists from the New York area were arrested, but all were soon released for lack of evidence.

Although a $100,000 reward was offered for information leading to an arrest, Flynn only had two clues to work with.

One was a handful of flyers discovered by a mailman in the minutes before the bomb went off. In prude red letters on yellow paper, the flyers read:

“Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you.”

It was signed by “American Anarchist Fighters,” the same group behind the 1919 bombings.

The other was a blacksmith from Little Italy who told police that a day before the bombing, a short, balding Sicilian came into his shop to either (depending on the telling):

1. Rent an old horse and cart.

2. Rent a horse to pull a cart,

Or 3. Have his old horse, who was already pulling a cart, fitted with new shoes.

Flynn didn’t have much to go on, and his investigation went nowhere. In retrospect, he would later insist he knew from the start his primary suspect was Mario Buda, but Buda was never brought in, never questioned, and no charges were ever filed against him.

Buda, meanwhile, still going under the name Mike Boda, slipped off to Providence, and by the end of the month was on his way back to Savignano where, despite ongoing political activity and occasional trouble with the police (including a five-year exile), he would spend the rest of his days as a quiet and serious shoemaker. He died on June 1st, 1963.

According to Buda’s nephew, in 1955 his uncle confessed to him that he had indeed built and delivered the Wall Street bomb, though it’s unclear if he confessed to any of the other bombings attributed to him. It’s also unclear if Buda, eight years before his death, clarified to his nephew whether the Wall Street bombing was done in reaction to the indictment of his friends, as a final Puck You to Attorney General Palmer—or, hell, merely as a kick in the balls to the whole damn capitalist system. We’ll likely never know. To this day, the shrapnel pockmarks from the bomb can still be seen on the facades of several financial district buildings, and the case remains open.

Buda was, without question, a shadowy and slippery character. Over the years he’s taken on the aura of a Dr. Mabuse or Professor Moriarity. And who knows? Maybe he really was a mad anarchist genius. After all, no clues were ever left behind at the scenes of the bombings attributed to him, so there’s no saying he wasn’t responsible for all of them and more. Maybe he really was that good. I’d like to believe so.

by Jim Knipfel

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

Text

Document: What Chinese Officials Told Children Whose Families Were Put in Camps https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-detention-directive.html

Document: What

Chinese Officials

Told Children

Whose Families

Were Put in Camps

PART 2

Published NOV. 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 16, 2019 |

This document, part of 403 pages obtained by The New York Times, tells Chinese officials in Xinjiang how to explain the disappearance of parents and families detained in camps built to hold Muslim minorities. Anguished students asking about their parents were told they had nothing to worry about.

LEAKED FILES EXPOSE HOW CHINA ORGANIZED MASS DETENTIONS OF MUSLIMS

Annex:

Tactics from Turpan City for answering questions asked by the children of concentrated education and training school1 students

1. Where are my family members?

They’re in a training school set up by the government to undergo collective systematic training, study and instruction. They have very good conditions for studying and living there, and you have nothing to worry about. Tuition for their period of study is free and so are food and living costs, and the standards are quite high. The provision for food is 21 yuan or more a day — that’s even better than the living standards that some students have back home.2 Our officials accompany them at study every day, offering counseling and assistance, and they eat the same food and live in the same dormitories, so you have absolutely no need to worry about how they’re doing. If you want to see them, we can arrange for you to have a video meeting.

2. Why do my family members have to take part in studying?

Your family member has been sent to study because they have come under a degree of harmful influence in religious extremism and violent terrorist thoughts. If at some point the “Three Forces” or people with ulterior motives incited or bewitched them, the consequences would be severe. 3If they came under the sway of extremist ideas and the “Three Forces” and did something that they shouldn’t do, they would injure not just innocent members of society, but also themselves and other family members, relatives and friends, including you. I don’t think that’s something you would ever want to see happen. So for everyone’s security, for the happiness of your family, and so that you can focus on your studies, we had to send them to a school at the first opportunity to undergo concentrated education and study.

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Q. and A.

1 This is one of the euphemistic terms the Chinese government uses to refer to the sprawling network of indoctrination camps it is using to detain an estimated one million Muslims in Xinjiang. The region in the country’s far west borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asian countries and is home to the Uighurs, a Turkic group, and other Muslim ethnic minorities.

2 Former detainees say facilities are sometimes overcrowded and unsanitary, with food that can be poor quality and withheld as punishment. The provision of 21 yuan is about $3.

3 The “Three Forces” refers to terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. The government’s definition of extremism often includes behavior that would be considered ordinary elsewhere, such as growing a beard or praying five times a day.

See Document

______

We have recruited the very best teachers so that your family member will be able to escape from the poison of religious extremism. The teachers will give them free instruction in the Chinese language, the law, national policies and job skills. 4That way, after they graduate, they won’t do anything harmful to themselves or others, and they will have learned skills that improve their job prospects. Currently, we are bringing in business and investment and attracting companies, and they will need many skilled workers. In the future, they will be able to find work in these enterprises and lift the family’s income and improve living conditions.5

3. My relative watched only one terrorist video, or participated in one illegal sermon. They have already recognized their mistake. Is it all right if they don’t study?

It is to their credit that they have been able to see the error of their ways and done some quick soul-searching. But never underestimate how mistaken one’s thinking has become. Because they will never be able to thoroughly unmask and understand the reactionary nature of religious extremism unless they undergo an extended period of standardized study and training that is comprehensive, systematic and behind closed doors,6 with correct instruction and guidance from teachers. Otherwise, they will never be able to thoroughly eradicate this stubborn cancer in their thinking and could easily again be swindled and exploited by criminal organizations and the Three Forces to break the law and flout the rules. Then they will fall into an abyss of criminality that would ruin your fine, happy family. Treasure this chance for free education that the party and the government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills. This offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.

Let me give you an example: A lot of people think that catching a cold is a little problem that doesn’t need treatment or attention. There is this happy-go-lucky mind-set that it’s no big deal. But actually, if a little cold doesn’t get attention and treatment is put off, this little illness could

______

Q. and A., page 2

4 Language is a source of discontent in Xinjiang, where the government has emphasized the teaching of Mandarin over the native languages of the minority groups. Former detainees say these camps have a heavily regimented routine in which they must repeatedly renounce Islamic beliefs and pledge their loyalty to the Communist Party.

5 The camps have been described as a way to provide job training, but many detainees had careers as scholars, civil servants and entertainers.

6 Former detainees have described facing round-the-clock surveillance and the constant threat of abuse.

See Document

______

turn into a serious one, and it could prompt an even more serious illness, or even become life-threatening.

After you become infected by religious extremism and terrorist ideas, unless you quickly receive “transformation through education,” it will be very difficult to ensure that there won’t be a recurring impact that leaves you open to being incited and bewitched. Your thoughts can be restored to health as quickly as possible only with systematic, enclosed “inpatient treatment” in our schools that thoroughly eradicates religious extremism and terrorist ideas.

4. Since it’s just training, why can’t they come home?

It seems that you’re still misunderstanding how concentrated education is run. Usually, you would return home for winter or summer vacation without any problem. But if you were careless and caught an infectious virus like SARS, you’d have to undergo enclosed, isolated treatment, because it’s an infectious illness. If you weren’t thoroughly cured, as soon as you returned home you would infect your family with this virus, and your whole family would fall ill.7 The party and government would not be so irresponsible that they would let a member of your family go home before their illness was cured and thinking thoroughly transformed, a situation in which they would do harm to others. I don’t think that you would talk lightly about coming home either. Besides, it is a school after all, and each school has its own strict management. Just like you would not impetuously show up late or skip class or take a break at your school. If everyone did that, running a school would be a mess, and that would also deprive you of many opportunities to acquire knowledge.

5. Did they commit a crime? Will they be convicted?

They haven’t committed a crime and won’t be convicted.8 It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts, and if they don’t quickly receive education and correction, they’ll become a major active threat to society and to your family. It’s very hard to totally eradicate viruses in thinking in just a short time. It needs to be dealt with like detox for drug addicts.

______

Q. and A., page 3

7 Party propaganda routinely uses the language of disease to refer to the perceived threat of religious extremism. Scholars and rights groups have said such language serves to justify mass detentions and dehumanizes the people being targeted.

8 Detention in the camps can lead to imprisonment, and the region has seen a surge in arrests, trials and prison sentences over the past two years, according to official data.

______

They must receive treatment in a detox center for some time before the scourge of addiction is totally beaten. Currently, only actively undergoing education and training can thoroughly eradicate this “malignant tumor” in their thinking, and only with healthy thinking can you have a happy family. I’m sure that you will support them, because this is for their own good and also for your own good. Freedom is only possible when this “virus” in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.

6. When can my family member graduate and leave school?

Anyone who understands Chinese medicine knows that treatment has a cycle. While they’re in concentrated, enclosed education and training, they are mainly studying the standard national language, laws and rules, and jobs skills. Based on the school’s “dual direction” assessment standards, they must be diligent in their studies, abide by the school rules and do outstandingly in morning exercises, chores, dining, study and so on. And family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors, and take an active part in collective life. Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards. It’s just like you can only graduate if you pass all your classes at school.

7. Are my family members bad people? After they get out, will they be discriminated against and be treated differently?

If they don’t undergo study in a school, if your family member isn’t fully awakened, it’s entirely possible that they will become wrongdoers (criminals). The goal of placing them in study is to rule out this risk or reduce it to the absolute minimum, and enable them to also master one or two job skills. After they complete their studies, they can be just like you when you graduate from university by becoming a valued member of society who understands the Chinese language and understands the law and abides by it. If your family member doesn’t have a job and they are willing to work, they can find a satisfying job in one of the businesses that we’ve brought in or established. They can realize their desire for a steady job there or open their own business, making wages of 3,000 to 5,000 renminbi a month. So we must take a long-term perspective. Your family member may be misunderstood for now, but look at this in terms of development and change. In the future, they’re sure to win the respect of society, neighbors and friends.

______

Q. and A., page 4

9 Former detainees have described point systems based on their performance and behavior that can affect when they are released. This passage also appears to outline a system of points for family members outside the camps that treats complaints or dissent as grounds for extending a relative’s detention.

________

8. Can my family members ask for leave to visit me?

This is strict, regulated and concentrated training behind closed doors. It’s just like when you did military training on entering high school or university. There is a very heavy emphasis on discipline. In general, leave won’t be granted while they’re in training and study. If you want to see your family member, we can arrange for you to see them through video.

9. Can public servants vouch for them so they can get out?

The school gives each student a dual-focus evaluation and a daily specialized assessment. The assessment covers every aspect of life and study, as well as the behavior of family members, including you. If their daily performance is outstanding, after a period of hard work and after they have finished their assigned classes and have mastered a certain level of conversational ability in the standard national language and have acquired one or two job skills, they can submit an application vouching for them, and the school will carry out an assessment and evaluation. If they meet the right conditions, the school will process their departure.

10. My family members are all in study, we have 10 mu of land, but there’s nobody to plant it; if I don’t have money for school, what will I do?

The party and government will do everything possible to ease your hardships. Your family member is undergoing instruction and training in a school, and they don’t have to pay for their language study or job training. The government also covers their food, clothing, housing, water, electricity and even medical care.

______

Q. and A., page 5

10 That is about $425 to $715 a month. Some exiles and researchers have said people from internment camps have been forced to work in factories with pay as low as $95 a month or even nothing at all.

11 The national language is Mandarin.

12 The detention program has caused widespread financial hardship among families who have lost breadwinners and businesses that have lost owners and employees. The campaign has even met internal resistance from some officials who were concerned that such sweeping internments would stall economic development. (The question refers to 10 mu, which is about 1.6 acres.)

_______

Village officials and the “visit-assist-unite” (fang-hui-ju) work team will also do all they can to help deal with family farming. Also, you don’t have to worry about your own tuition fees; the government will help you deal with that. As long as your situation is as described, we will help handle your tuition costs. At the same time, you can apply for a poverty allowance or a study loan at your school. It will never be that you won’t be able to afford tuition and your education held back because your family member is doing concentrated education and training.

11. My family has a lot of things to deal with and their length of time in re-education is a bit long. Is there any way their study period could be shortened?

If you’re worried that nobody is around to take care of your family and so won’t accept the training, that’s being irresponsible to your family and to society. Your family member’s thinking has been infected with a “virus,” and they definitely need swift “residential treatment” before illness breaks out and before they head down the road of criminality. One day sooner in eradicating this “malignant tumor” in their thinking means one day sooner that they may return to their family and society. Don’t ever take a happy-go-lucky attitude or become phobic about treating diseases and skip this optimum time for treatment. That’s how a small illness becomes a serious one, and could even reach the point where it becomes incurable. That would bring incalculable harm to society and to your family. By then, it would be too late for any regrets.

12. My family member is old, they would not do any harm to anyone, so is there any way they could be let out?

If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism, and then they will never thoroughly grasp that spreading extremist religious ideas and taking part in illegal religious activities are criminal acts. They will never grasp that they are on the road of no return, never grasp that they are becoming a public enemy, wrecking national and ethnic unity and endangering society. Participating in study and education is not just the right of every citizen, it also their duty. No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study. Only after they come to their senses will they stop spreading dangerous ideas to neighbors and friends who don’t understand the truth and can’t tell right from wrong. For instance, the poison of religious extremism is being deeply felt in Iraq, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. The areas where Islamic State extremist forces have spread are in ruins and their people have fled, losing everything and suffering unspeakable hardship along with countless casualties. I’m sure that you and your family wouldn’t like to live in a country like that. Each of us makes our own small contribution to maintaining social stability and defending our home.

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Q. and A., page 6

13 The “visit-assist-unite” program involves teams of officials visiting Uighur and other minority families to gather personal information, including religious and ideological views.

14 Former inmates and human rights groups have reported that people as old as in their 80s are held in camps.

13. You gave my relatives passports and let them travel, and on television it said it was all right to travel abroad, but when they returned, they were taken away.

______

Our national citizens can lawfully obtain passports and have the appropriate right to legitimate travel abroad. The party and government have always supported and encouraged this. But you have to clearly understand that the struggle against separatism in Xinjiang is grim, and hostile forces and elements abroad have not relaxed for one moment in subversion and sabotage in Xinjiang. They don’t like seeing how stable and unified our social conditions are, and don’t like to see our great picture of rapid economic and social development with the people living and working in peace and contentment. Whenever any of us visits a sensitive country, they will do their utmost to hoodwink and recruit them, try to fill them with religious extremism and brainwash them into becoming turncoats, pawns for subverting our government, pieces moved around at the behest of others. This must be taken very seriously by every citizen, because it concerns the lives and safety of our families and the stability of our society. Because they have visited countries where religious extremism is very serious and they may have come under its influence, the dangers are immense as soon as the buds of religious extremism appear. That’s why it’s really necessary to put them through legal-system education and patriotic education after they return.

Q. and A., page 7

15 Some detainees were targeted after they traveled to some two dozen countries, almost all Muslim majority, deemed sensitive by the authorities, including Turkey, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. Such a policy was a sharp reversal from previous decades, when the authorities increasingly allowed Xinjiang residents to travel abroad.

Turpan City’s “Three Immediates, Five-Step Work Method” for Effectively Strengthening the Education and Supervision of Returning Students Whose Relatives Are Being Punished

Turpan City is seriously implementing the spirit of the autonomous region party committee’s “Announcement Concerning Doing a Good Job of Ideological Education and Management Service Work for Middle School, High School, University and Technical School Students Returning Home on Summer Break Period and Whose Family Members Are Being Punished During the ‘Strike Hard’ Campaign.” Persevere in getting things done right away, immediately organize special subject meetings, promptly implement emergency deployment plans for the educational management of students returning home in the summer whose family members are being punished,16 inseparably unite practice, draw up and give instructions to subordinates on special item work plans, amply display the important function of township (town, farm, street), village (community), former school and police station, “three departments as one,” be at the front of every work item, conscientiously report as soon as possible, discuss as soon as possible, resolve family difficulties as soon as possible, completely implement the “Five-Step Work Method,” fulfill the education of returning students whose family members are being punished, seamlessly link up stability control, ensure thought stability, prevent the emergence of no support, no understanding, contradiction, conflict and similar situations.

I. Support the “Three Immediates”

Immediately report: Returning students from other parts of China have widespread social ties across the entire country. The moment they issue incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate. Students must undergo ideological re-education so that soon after they return, they understand the true significance of why their family members are undergoing concentrated education and the problem of infection on arrival is dealt with, the students’ thinking must be undergoing reeducation. Plainclothes police, village and neighborhood officials and family members must meet them as soon as they arrive, to show humane concern and stress the rules.17

Immediate discussion: As soon as students return home, carry out direct thought guidance,remove doubt or misunderstandings. Avoid having officials with low-level understanding of correct principles leave students unclear during their first heart-to-heart guidance. Ensure that the first talk is given by a leading official of the township (town, farm, street), the head of the class at their former school, or the chief of the local police station who has previously been familiarized with policies and the returning student’s fundamental situation; jointly list a discussion outline; and personally give heart-to-heart guidance.

Immediately solve family difficulties: Respond to students whose fathers or mothers are undergoing concentrated education and training and who have adjustment problems when they first return home and face a serious possibility of experiencing turmoil after seeing the range of work and hardship in their families.18 Their paired poverty eradication partners must visit the home soon after arrival to understand the practical hardships of students’ families and coordinate to solve them so that students feel the warmth of the party and government. This ensures that they are focused on participating in education and training, social practice and job internships.

_______

Directive

16 The document advises officials to inform students that their relatives are being treated for signs of extremism, but throughout its instructions to the officials it refers to the relatives as being punished.

_______

17 The crackdown in Xinjiang heightened the authorities’ concerns about returning students, whom the Communist Party saw as a key part of efforts to mold Muslim minorities into loyal subjects. This passage reveals fears that such students could spread criticism of the camps, and orders the police and school and local government officials to help monitor them.

See Document

II. Strictly Implement the “Five-Step Work Method”

Step 1: Fully assess the situation, set up a file and take the initiative to link up. For each township (town, farm, street), village (community), visit-assist-unite (fang-hui-ju) residents’ village work team, village (community) police service room, quickly carry out a concentrated assessment and inspection of students in the jurisdiction who are studying outside, check one after another, implement one after another, register one after another, take the initiative to link up, ensure preparation to grasp the students’ time of arrival and train number.

Step 2: Psychological guidance and thought inspection. The township (town, farm, street) Ministry of Justice office that will receive the students will first organize the main leaders of the township (town, farm, street), the police station chief and former school class teacher to wait at the Ministry of Justice office. They will prepare a discussion topic outline in advance, wait for the moment the student returns to enter discussions and exchange (see “Tactics from Turpan City for answering the questions asked by the children of concentrated education and training school students”), understand the students’ living situation, and do a good job of the “five things to explain clearly” work, and according to the students’ clothing, behavior, spiritual outlook and other external expressions, be sure to check the students’ mobile phones, MP3s, MP4s, USB drives, multimedia cards and computers and other mobile storage devices, as well as books, to accurately grasp the students’ ideological trends and make sure they have not become infected and are developing in a healthy manner.

_________

Directive, page 3

19 The document orders the authorities to investigate returning students and search their phones, computers and other devices. Local officials must meet with them daily and assess their thinking and behavior.

See Document

_______

Step 3: Report as soon as one returns to the village and pair up to assist. After students have had their first talk on ideological persuasion on return to their township (town, farm or street), village (community) officials and work team cadres must immediately visit their homes and make sure that “for each one who returns, a report is made and registration is filed.” At the same time, every student who has a family member being punished must be matched in a “trinity” with their officials from the village or neighborhood, former school and the police station to ensure they have daily meetings and conversations. Give them guidance, organize activities and promptly understand the returning students’ thoughts and how they are behaving in reality.19 For those students whose parents are both being punished and who do not have other immediate family or have immediate relatives who are unable to provide care, develop a special work program, a visit program or an aid program according to the living conditions of other relatives in the family, the family’s income and other conditions. And have the township’s (town, farm, street) party and political team members responsible for managing it as a whole set up an internship position such that each person is supported by one plan.

Step 4: Educational practice and quantitative assessment. Township (town, farm, street) party committees, based on the current stability maintenance trend, will promptly arrange training activities for returning students that focus heavily on “535”: (that is, “Five Classes”: security, job internship class, legal class, ethnic unity class and mobile internet security class; the “Xinjiang Three Histories,” which includes ethnic history, religious history, Xinjiang history; as well as the “Five Identifications”: identifying with the motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Communist Party and socialism with Chinese characteristics.) They should adopt “point on point,” “one to one,” “many to one” and other methods, and patiently and carefully carry out the party’s policies on education and psychological guidance with returned students, provide them with employment and entrepreneurship positions, organize and develop volunteers and “ethnic unity family” cultural performances, visit their hometowns to observe the development and other activities, to let these students really feel the party and the government’s concern, so that they are not bearing an ideological burden, cherish their rare educational opportunity, and work at growing and become successful. Place returning students with family members being punished in concentrated education and training under “dual administration” and “dual assessment” with quantified assessment points administration. Assign quantified points every day to returning students’ words and actions, attendance in training, social practice, job internships, video meetings and other developments. At the same time, allow more frequent video meetings with family members while the students are on summer vacation, and tell the parents promptly how the students are doing at home, at internships; set up bridges linking the students with their parents to ensure that the individuals who are being punished are able to receive their education in peace while the returning students’ minds can be stable.

Step 5: Analysis and judgment and seamless connection. The person in charge at the township (town, farm, street) should compare the implementation of the “Three Immediates” and the “Five-Step Work Method” and seriously fill in the “Assessment and Control Files for the Returning Children of the Students of Concentrated Education and Training in Turpan City.” Hold daily seminars to comprehensively assess the returning students’ real-life performance and research solutions to existing problems and control measures. At the same time, carry out well the work of sending the student back to school by seeing them off at stations. The supporting cadres should take the initiative to connect with the head teacher who is receiving the student and inform the teacher of the student’s thoughts and actions to realize a seamless connection. After the students’ vacation is over and they return to school, every township (town, farm, street) should place the “Assessment and Control Files for the Returning Children of the Students of Concentrated Education and Training in Turpan City” under sealed management, make copies for the office of returning students’ management, the public security stations, and the concentrated education and training schools, for these files to be used as education and supervision reference material the next time the students return home.

______

Directive, page 4

20 The document orders officials to keep detailed files on each student, copies of which are sent to the police, the indoctrination camps and other offices.

See Document

______

To omit any identifying markings, these documents have been retyped to resemble the originals.

#trump china #china #no china extradition #china news #uighur #uigures #uighurs #crimes against humanity #humanrights #humanity #human rights #hong kong protests #hong kong #hongkong #politics and government #politics #muslim #communist #communism

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girl-debord · 5 years ago

Text

Cultural Exegesis: Cops on Television

The following is an essay I wrote for a cultural interpretation class last semester.

Surfing the channels on television or scrolling through the selection of shows on Netflix or Hulu, it is just about impossible to miss the waves of police procedurals that saturate American media. As of the week of March 4, 2019, two television programs out of the Nielsen Top 10 list for Prime Broadcast Network TV were dramas focusing on crime and police. Even in shows that aren’t built around the police procedural genre, police feature disproportionately as on-screen characters.

Television dramas following cops are, by this point, a well-established fixture of American media. These shows have been around since the late 40s and have their roots in films about western sheriffs and private detectives. Decades of this kind of entertainment have laid the groundwork for a new set of archetypes of cop characters and made possible the rise of police-centric TV of other genres, including comedies like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Castle.

In a 2016 interview with The Frame, researcher Kathleen Donovan, co-author of a study entitled “The Role of Entertainment Media in Perceptions of Police Use of Force,” told journalists that her findings showed that people spend more time consuming entertainment media than news, and that that affects their perceptions of the police. “By far the largest impact was on perceptions of how effective the police are,” she said. “In the content analysis, the way police are shown in these shows is that they're incredibly effective. People who watch these shows tend to think that police are a lot better at their job in terms of clearing crimes than they are in reality.” As the name of her study implies, Donovan has also found that television alters public perception of police violence. “It's almost always portrayed in a justified light,” she said. If a cop steps out of line, it is in order to punish someone the show has already proved to the audience is evil or to extract necessary information from a criminal.

While many people feel that they can distinguish between real and fictional cops, Donovan pointed out something that is troubling—“The problem is, [viewers] don't have other places that they're getting this information from,” she said. “They're not getting a lot of interaction with the police officers on a day to day level.” Even a discerning media consumer is likely to spend much more time around the cops of television than the cops of the real world. It is simply impossible to be really unaffected by this.

Of course, the idea that our media consumption habits affect our views should come as no surprise, even when the particular effect a piece of media has is disturbing. But the reason Donovan’s findings are significant is because these television programs do not spring up out of nothing. Certainly there would not be so many cop shows on TV if there was no demand for them, but that demand has its roots in something more sinister.

Matthew Alford reported for The Conversation in 2017 that since the establishment of its Entertainment Liaison Office in 1948, the Pentagon has been involved in the production of more than 1,100 television shows. And at a local level, individual police departments have worked with television producers to create positive PR consistently over the last several decades. In a letter to an ad agency in 1968, Bob Cinader, who was working on the upcoming show Adam-12, wrote, “Like all major police departments throughout the country, the LAPD's two biggest problems are recruitment and community relations. They feel that a series about the uniformed police officer would be of even greater help to them in particular and the cause of law and order in general.” In the wake of the Watts riots of 1965 and a growing sense of anti-authoritarian sentiment, turning to TV was a strategic move for the LAPD. In the time of the Rodney King riots and growing unrest, shows like Law & Order filled a similar role. Even in recent years, NYPD scandals and a resurgence of real critique of the police coincide with Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Blue Bloods.

The relationship goes beyond purely fictional television and into the realm of the late-80s boom of reality television, which turned its eye onto the police with John Langley’s COPS. “COPS’ foremost legacy, aside from its forceful introduction of a new form of televisuality, is as a highly effective PR bullhorn for the ‘human’ side of police-work,” writer Eric Harvey explains in a 2015 essay for Pitchfork. “Reenactments were replaced by what Langley called ‘raw reality,’ which encouraged a voyeuristic position to take in the action. The reality of raw reality, of course, is that COPS traded any pretense toward objectivity for an unprecedented level of backstage access; in the show’s world, perpetrators are anonymous while police officers are well-rounded characters who provide each episode’s narrative arc.”

In the 90s, whether through the sleek stories of Law & Order or the police-raid porn of COPS, television viewers were already absorbing content that would shape their understanding of law enforcement. Even if this content was not directly created by police departments or the Pentagon, in most cases, it had the approval of these authorities, and more importantly, police television going forward would be built upon the very positive image that these shows generated. A contemporary television program might never have its scripts reviewed by a government agency or work with police departments as PR, but in all things pertaining to the cops, the cultural propaganda had already worked its magic. The “good cop” archetype that shows like Adam-12 and Dragnet had worked so hard to make was already a known commodity, an established trope to build on and work with.

But more than the image of the squeaky-clean cop that captured the imaginations of many Americans, the most effective tool in changing the public perception of police has been the methodological understanding of the world that entertainment like this presents to its audiences. As Kathleen Donovan pointed out, the use of force by police is almost unilaterally justified by the narratives of the shows that depict them. “Within a minute and a half of the first episode, the show has summed up its central message: Police violence works,” Aaron Miguel Cantú writes in his 2014 review of Chicago PD. “This is relayed again and again throughout the series: When a cop with a chain-wrapped fist savagely beats a Spanish-speaking suspect demanding an attorney until he relinquishes a tip; when officers debase the idea of policing without intent to arrest; when cops round up black non-criminals and deliver them to precinct torture chambers. In every episode, these methods achieve the desired ends.” The image gritty cop programs like this present of police departments is one of a world that is, perhaps realistically, filled with violence. But in order for the police to be the heroes of this world, the plot must produce ends sufficient to justify the means: the arrest of a violent criminal, the prevention of a dangerous terrorist act, etc.

The underlying implication here is an idea that has come to be woven through much of American media: the world is a dangerous place, and authoritarian measures are a necessary evil to protect the innocent from the criminal. As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it, “The condition of man is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.” And certainly Hobbes would approve of this picture painted by cop shows: the rights of criminals (who are at any time determined to be so by law enforcement) are incidental to preserving order and so must be subsumed into the Leviathanic police state for the good of everyone. The television programs can do their best to portray cops as wholesome defenders of the peace. But at some point, there needs to be a little realism—the fact that these people carrying guns on behalf of the state employ violence as a part of their job is too obvious to ignore. So the TV instead presents us with police forces who do engage in violence, who do things which would be unspeakable for any real-life civilian—but they present us with the kind of world that makes this justifiable, a dangerous, threatening world in which everyone is an enemy. Donovan highlights the fact that the majority of television crimes are murders—a gross overrepresentation, but one that helps to uphold this image. This is the kind of world that justifies police violence. The narrative is not just about trusting the police, it’s about being afraid enough of everyone else to believe firmly that everything the police do is necessary.

This is the world of COPS. As Tim Stelloh writes in a 2018 article for The Marshall Project, “Civil rights activists, criminologists, and other observers have described [COPS] as a racist and classist depiction of the country, one in which crime is a relentless threat and officers are often in pitched battle against the poor black and brown perpetrators of that crime.” It’s a fascist’s view of society, coming here not from writers but from the police themselves, whose commentary frames the events of each episode. COPS gives viewers a taste of the reality of American law enforcement, just not the reality it claims. The program allows us to see the role of police as they see themselves, in full, action-packed detail.

The other side of this authoritarian outlook has become a media obsession in recent years, perhaps nearly to the extent of police procedurals. The appeal of shows like NBC’s Dateline in presenting the shock and horror of crime has proven effective even with a more dramatic format. Where Law & Order walked the line between the heroism of the justice system and the horror of crime, programs like Criminal Minds tend to delve deeper into the latter. This kind of media, lending its attention to serial killers and brutal rapists, provides a necessary balance for the traditional cop dramas. Hannibal, American Crime Story, and adjacent programs give us criminals who are as intelligent and charismatic as they are violent—worthy opponents for an increasingly militarized and surveilling police force. Of course, one might argue that these characters are clear fantasies to audiences, like supervillains or space aliens. But if most viewers have little interaction with police, how much experience can they be expected to have with killers? The intellectually or socially capable murderer provides the kind of fear necessary to move people towards embracing the total authority of law enforcement—both on-screen and in real life.

This fear is more congruent with later cop shows whose focus on gritty violence in the name of justice measures up to the violence of depraved criminals that fascinates audiences. But the friendlier image of police from the days of Adam-12 still finds its place in modern television. One niche is in the aforementioned police comedy—shows such as NBC’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine give us police to relate to and enjoy who are earnest in their pursuit of justice and can accomplish their (admittedly tamer) goals with minimal violence and maximal shenanigans. In a time of pubic distrust for the police, B99 excuses its cops from blame by contrasting them to bad cops and making gestures toward the notion that police violence is an issue of concern. But a show that concerns itself mainly with police as a wholesome source of comedy is ill-equipped to deal with the uncomfortable realities of the NYPD’s behavior. How often is Andy Samberg’s good-hearted character called upon to evict homeless people from parks or cooperate with ICE officers to detain migrant families? Citing the NYPD’s record-low public opinion ratings, Will Leitch writes in a review for Bloomberg, “This hasn’t reached the world of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The only people who hate cops on Brooklyn Nine-Nine are the wretched perps our heroes keep hauling in. The sitcom is standard cop-show fare in that regard, except more so; while a drama can allow our cop heroes the shading to become anti-heroes, the sitcom can’t really go that dark.”

Alongside the police sitcom is another niche for friendly cops to make an appearance which is perhaps more troubling: in children’s media. A slew of op-eds by parents in 2017 in publications like the Guardian and Baptist News called into question some of the implications of television shows like Paw Patrol. The cartoon, featuring dogs in the roles of emergency services, shows its police pup Chase using a “spy drone” for surveillance and coming to the aid of helpless citizens who continually put themselves in danger. Many parents were concerned about the lack of nuance in how the show presented authorities. In a response to these concerns Elissa Strauss wrote for CNN’s website, she cited author Tovah Klein, explaining, “Despite their reputation of innocence, children are bubbling cauldrons of conflicting feelings and impulses. This is especially the case during toddler and preschool years, when they become aware of their capacity to do bad things and struggle with understanding those urges. […] Good and bad are clearly articulated states in those shows, and should one misbehave, the repercussions are clear and predictable.” Strauss seems to believe this is sufficient to let parents breathe a sigh of relief. But if the response to children’s struggle with right and wrong that Paw Patrol gives is to seek the approval of authorities, what is there to be relieved about?

The amiable, endearing police of Paw Patrol and Brooklyn Nine-Nine who are eager to help and the tough, violent cops of Chicago PD and COPS who are a necessary force against the horrors of crime represent a particular understanding of law enforcement that is transmitted to children and adults alike. When the primary experience of most people with police is in entertainment, the images stick, and its effects make themselves known. In public discourse, people can be tricked into defending the actions of real police officers based on their time spent with the stories of fictional cops. Despite claims of a national crime wave and a “war on police,” the Brennan Center reports, as of 2017, declining crime rates and assaults on law enforcement, while Mapping Police Violence reported a general increase in the number of people killed by police from 2013 to 2016. While it may just be the tip of the iceberg of a culture of authoritarianism, cop shows on TV are at least partially responsible.

#another frodobell original #acab #copaganda #brooklyn nine nine

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expatimes · 4 years ago

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Defeating fascism beyond the ballot

The world can breathe a sigh of relief that it will not know just how unhinged Donald Trump would have become with the validation of re-election, especially after already surviving literally hundreds of scandals and an official impeachment.

Trump’s defeat – largely to the credit of Black people, especially Black women – is immeasurably consequential for the planet. Even without a majority in the Senate (which Democrats still have a slim shot at winning in Georgia’s upcoming runoff elections), the United States can now work internationally and domestically to undo the damage Trump caused during four years of his presidency.

However, the US faces steep, deep-seated problems that neither began, nor will end, with Donald Trump. As liberals celebrate a “return to normalcy,” the people who delivered this victory will not be satisfied by a return to a profoundly violent status quo.

Trump and his disciples already plot a comeback, but if we study how he was narrowly defeated, we can prevent society from welcoming his brand of politics again.

Denormalisation

If liberals thought of Trump’s constant lying and false promises as “un-American,” they should listen to Native Americans and read about the long history of Indigenous genocide as nonpartisan US government policy.

This is a country built on Black enslavement and Indigenous genocide, constructed by a racist system of law and lifted by imperialism. Now, as the empire crumbles, it is also a country descending into a neo-feudal society only buttressed by a consolidating panopticon of state violence and corporate surveillance.

These are not problems that can be addressed individually and there are no cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all solutions. Rather, everyone has the power to wield, given their specific positions in society, and everyone must play a role if we want to change institutions and systems. Start exactly where you already are.

Trump has spent years broadcasting that he would try anything to maintain the presidency, including legal and clandestine voter suppression and intimidation. If the election’s integrity can be protected from Trump and his supporters’ ongoing attempt at a coup d’état, we will still emerge into a polarised country where nearly half of the voting population – roughly 70 million overwhelmingly white people – do not consider bigotry a deal breaker.

The ratio of people who approve of political violence is growing substantially across the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, a good portion of the populace has a twisted view of reality, where rumour and conspiracy are more important than critical thought or facts. Research shows that many of them can be converted, but how?

Personal relationships can slowly rebuild shared trust. In practice, this includes the sometimes difficult job of listening patiently and empathetically to friends who have fallen for concerted misinformation campaigns and more diffuse efforts of manipulation. Everyday compassion might be our best way out of the social media bubbles and conspiracy theories that cloud our collective foresight.

Undoing oppression cannot be a burden placed on the oppressed – people living at the intersection of marginalised social categories. People mobilised by this electoral wave must support and invest in communities of colour, but without demanding that marginalised people find “common ground” with fascism. The hard work of confronting and transforming this system must be carried out by those most structurally privileged.

Critique as a gift

One of the most important long-term strategies is scaling up this kind of work into intentional organising and community building everywhere: our work, families, friends, everyday interactions and wherever else possible.

The long-term political battleground is cultural, as Antonio Gramsci wrote from prison almost 100 years ago and US conservatives have understood since at least the 1970s. In the words of Republican media strategist Pat Buchanan, “if you capture the culture of the country, eventually you might prevail.”

The right-wing strategy of recapturing American culture after the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s explains why the strongest sources of censorship and “political correctness” in this country are not leftist “online mobs,” but rather conservative entities like the Texas State Board of Education, which has spent decades rewriting history with political intent.

In its narratives of exceptionalism and refusal to teach this country’s violent history, the board denies generations the opportunity to reckon with the structures that shape their present realities. And given Texas’s population size, textbooks produced for that state influence instructional materials in many other states, and the effects of this miseducation grow and become embedded over time.

Evidence of the “culture war” strategy is abundant today, well beyond Fox News. Spend a minimal amount of time on social media and you will come across the disinformation machine fuelled by millions of dollars of Koch money, propaganda videos on YouTube from accounts like PragerU (which is not a university of any kind), and thousands of similar copycat accounts that are likewise monetising narratives of white victimhood and paranoia.

We must learn and teach each other how to better recognise propaganda, appreciate difference and confront injustice. Furthermore, we must commit ourselves to more intentional and democratic relationships, contrary to the dominant paradigms where we are always in competition and our victories must come at someone else’s expense.

Breaking the grip of these ideas will require building an alternative through mindful practice – embracing constructive critique, learning to give and cherish feedback, knowing how to apologise and grow, and preferring strategic bridging over destructive sanctimony. Neither performative cruelty nor tone policing can help us get there. Accountability is not the same as fixating on someone’s small mistakes or clumsy language.

As bell hooks has put it, “Forgiveness and compassion are always linked: How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”

Uprooting arrogance at a societal level requires self-examination. We should support each other more and police each other less.

Merging left without compromising values

Lasting change will also require merging around a transformative agenda that speaks to different constituencies without sacrificing progressive values or pandering to colonial tendencies.

Among other things, this vision for systemic change must include Black reparations, radically curtailing or even withdrawing the state’s power to inflict violence on marginalised communities through policing and criminal punishment, honouring the treaties this country made with Native peoples, expanded equal access to rights like education and healthcare, demilitarisation, equal pay, progressive taxation on the ultra-rich, green jobs, decarbonisation and environmental justice.

The policies above are overwhelmingly popular with the electorate but they remain difficult under our current institutional design. Therefore, organisers must work community by community, state by state, and federally towards procedural reforms that can yield structural payoffs.

These include abolishing the electoral college, honouring Puerto Rico’s vote for statehood, instituting ranked-choice voting, protecting voter rights such as universal registration and mail voting, making election day a holiday, mandating voting as a civic duty, reforming campaign financing, instituting an independent commission to reverse partisan districting, democratising the Senate by making it proportionally representative of states’ populations, curtailing executive authority to make war and surveil the world, and more.

In all, our platforms must be driven by intersectional analyses attentive to how each policy will differently impact people depending on their various identities and social positions. We otherwise risk reproducing a long trend within so-called progressive movements led by men and white people, and especially white men, where their concerns become the default. Everyone else is dismissed with demands to “not be divisive” about our very real differences, which are treated as something to reduce or eliminate, rather than appreciate and welcome.

Personnel is policy: taking and making space

In the finer details, social transformation will require shifting the field organising strategy and infrastructure of political parties, especially the Democrats. The 2020 election cycle proved that the old guard’s strategies are ineffective, but also that their antidote is bottom-up energy. In particular, one of the most significant investments donors can make is in year-round community organising and canvassing efforts to build up sustained power.

Trump’s defeat belongs to social movements and activists, especially Black organisers and Black women in particular, who turned out to vote in record numbers.

Credit is also due to Indigenous voters who undeniably helped tip Arizona, Wisconsin, and played an important role in Democratic victories in other states, despite the disrespectful erasure of Indigenous peoples in corporate media coverage of the election. States like Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Michigan were likewise won by organisations like Mission for Arizona, spearheaded by young Latinas.

These organisations lack the resources of the Democratic establishment but did the hard work that paved the way for Trump’s defeat. Let us save the symbolic gestures of gratitude and actually provide these groups ongoing support and investment.

Incorporating these solutions requires altering not only policy platforms but also the makeup of the party. Democrats are more diverse than the Republicans in membership, but not much more in leadership. White consultants who occupy most positions of power inevitably approach issues with internalised biases, and thereby come to the “impartial” conclusion that “X community does not vote, so more resources must be redirected towards old white voters instead,” which only becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As long as strategic decision-making remains dominated by white strategists, the party will continue redirecting resources away from its most important and yet most disrespected backbone of support – people of colour – thereby feeding apathy and disaffection. Do not expect marginalised communities to continue rescuing a party that refuses to hear or show up for its own base.

A politics of love

“Your Congresswoman-elect loves you,” Cori Bush declared during her acceptance speech. “If I love you, I care that you eat. If I love you, I care that you have shelter and adequate, safe housing. If I love you, I care that you have clean water and clean air, and you have a liveable wage. If I love you, I care that the police don’t murder you.”

Flawed as the electoral process is, it remains crucial to making social change. Elections provide a structure of opportunity, attention and resources to organise and reshape discussions about our material, everyday realities. Activists interested in changing society must therefore continue to engage their momentum and give them direction, all while changing their traditional model – from one where our energy flows upward to support the liberal establishment, towards one where we instead draw resources from electoral cycles to improve and sustain our communities beyond them.

Activists should remain critical of the risk of activist energy being co-opted by a Democratic Party that has presided over a bipartisan dismantling of public services such as housing, bloating and militarisation of a racist policing system, mass incarceration exacerbated by their own crime bills, mass deportation programmes, indiscriminate surveillance, growing inequalities, and a war and carbon-based economy.

At the same time, the work of groups like those mentioned above shows that it is possible to build electoral power without sacrificing organisational autonomy at the grassroots.

The pace of change in political institutions is unbearably slow by design. However, taking state power remains important to altering the daily realities of people’s lives. Around each new win up and down the ticket, no matter how small, we can rally new resources and recruits, feel our power through our results, and grow the fight for radical democracy, both within and well beyond the state.

Love is an everyday, radical mission. Collective liberation requires an ethic of care and a strategy for building political communities rooted in shared respect for all living things. In this, anyone can play a role, everyone is needed and everything must be built with intention – forging welcoming spaces, ceding space, redistributing power, organising solidarity everywhere, winning small battles, persuading the public and scaling upward to generate new possibilities in our unwritten future.

Given the interlinked crises facing humanity, radical change is more urgent now than ever, so let’s pick up a clipboard and do the work, following the leadership of the people of colour, especially Black people, and especially women, who won this election.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

. #world Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=15259&feed_id=21933

#DonaldTrump #Inequality #JoeBiden #Opinions #Politics #Racism #UnitedStates #USampCanada #USElections2020

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orion-blvck-blog · 7 years ago

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A List of Things About Orion

This is a list (duh) of headcanons and other little facts about Orion. It’s a bit long and nothing is in any particular order, although I tried to organize it a little bit. Some things are kind of important (like his job and shit) and other things are just for fun. It’s mostly here so I don’t have to remember some of this stuff.

Orion was born on May 16th, 1929 at 3:33am. He is a Taurus.

His favorite word is ‘fuck’.

Orion is a very serious and stoic man, but he still has that same shit-eating, arrogant Black smirk that just pisses people off.

He’s also an asshole. A know-it-all asshole and enjoys making people uncomfortable, angry, or scared. It’s funny to him.

All of Orion’s clothes come from their world, but every piece is custom made and perfectly tailored to his measurements. As far as fashion goes, Orion is much more modern than other wizards. Mostly because he doesn’t want to dress like some old wizard like Dumbledore.

He is very serious about healthy eating and nutrition; always starting the day with a bowl of oats and berries, hardly ever eats red meat, and he hates bread. Sweets and junk food rarely make it into the house without him knowing (or so he thinks). He also has no problem pointing out someones unhealthy eating habits and giving them a lecture.

Orion carries an extra wand with him at all times. It is an uncommon practice (I think???) that he started after his escape from the hands of Aversio. The wand is nothing fancy, but very flexible and a well-rounded. He keeps it tucked away in the sleeve of his shirt, completely hidden and out of mind unless he calls upon it.

He also keeps a hidden silver dagger up his other sleeve and one around his ankle. Dude is paranoid af.

He’s cheated on Walburga. Quite a few times and feels incredibly guilty, but can’t stop.

He loves playing wizard chess. Especially when he’s playing with Drik, but don’t tell anyone.

Orion has a sister who he is extremely close to, but has kept his distance from her the last few years in case his enemies realize this and try to find her. She understands.

Orion worked at the Ministry for nearly 30 years in the International Magical Office of Law as well as the International Confederation of Wizards. This position was particularly useful to Voldemort and Orion often used it to spread Death Eater and anti-muggle propaganda, all secretly of course. Before being captured by Aversio, it was well known that Orion was a purist and despised anyone who wasn’t pureblood, but it wasn’t known that he was a Death Eater. He retired in the fall of 1978, at the urging of Voldemort so Orion could fully dedicate himself to the cause.

In his mid 20s, Orion became an alcoholic not long after killing for the first time under Voldemort’s orders. Blackouts and violent outbursts were very common when Orion drank enough and because of this he has been hospitalized three times. The last time was after he murdered a muggle family which made headlines in the muggle world. Voldemort gave him an ultimatum and he has been sober ever since. It’s been six years. The only time Orion has ever relapsed is when Sirius ran away. No one knows this except for those closest to him.

Because of his sobriety, Orion is an avid tea drinker. There is almost always a cup in his hand. He likes black or jasmine tea and demands that it be extra hot otherwise he won’t drink it.

He doesn’t wear his Death Eater mask during meetings or with the Inner Circle, but if he’s on an assignment or just out causing chaos then he’ll wear his mask. It’s well known within the Death Eater army who he is. He does have the mark.

As a Death Eater, Orion has given his life to the Dark Lord and has worked hard to make his army strong. In his younger days, Orion was one of the Death Eaters who interrogated and tortured their enemies. He was exceptionally good at breaking a persons mind, body and spirit. These days Orion focuses on battle strategies, training/helping the younger Death Eaters, and completing specific missions from Voldemort himself. Sometimes, he is called upon to interrogate particularly hard cases.

He was badly injured and dehydrated during his imprisonment. Orion was mostly used as a punching bag when Aversio members realized he wouldn’t talk. Because of his injuries, Orion now walks with a cane. Some days are easier and he can keep it hidden in his robe. Other days are horrible and he must use it despite how weak it makes him feel.

Orion escaped Aversio with no help, practically with his bare hands, and is finding it increasingly hard to suppress the resentment and bitterness he feels towards his fellow Death Eaters for leaving him to rot in his cell.

He always wears a black and gold ring on his left hand; a family heirloom with the House of Black crest engraved on it. If he is in grave danger, the ring will disappear and reappear in his safe in his study. There is a faint glow to it. When that glow stops, he’s dead. Yeah.

The only person who can open the door to his study is Orion himself, unless he allows someone to enter or changes the spell.

Deep in his closest, there is a leather jacket in perfect condition that he stole from a muggle-born in his third year at Hogwarts. He wore it nearly everyday instead of his robes, but once summer came he hid it so his parents wouldn’t find it. Not even Walburga knows of its existence.

He never wanted to be Minister, not even as a child, but when Voldemort asked him to run Orion had no choice but to say yes. It was merely a show of power and strength after one of his best managed to get captured. Orion was relieved when it was announced he didn’t win, though he can’t help but feel like a disappointment for failing Lord Voldemort.

All of his shoes are charmed so if he leaves footprints anywhere they will disappear immediately.

Wherever he is, Orion sits with his back to the wall that way no one can sneak up on him. Not that anyone would try, right?

His first love was a half-blooded Ravenclaw girl. He regrets fucking that up, but reminds himself that he had no choice.

Despite being a very skilled dueler, Orion is known to resort to physical violence, especially if he’s been drinking. He packs a punch just as powerful as he throws spells.

As a student at Hogwarts, Orion focused on his studies to the point of mental and physical exhaustion in order to please his parents. Some days, it took all of his strength to get out of bed. Other days, it took all of his strength to not break down completely. When he wasn’t working on homework or studying, Orion played Quidditch as one of Slytherins beaters and was even team captain in his sixth and seventh years.

Many believe Orion’s hatred for Sirius is because he willingly left the family and while that is true, it is not the whole truth. Like Sirius at his age, Orion dreamed about running away from the House of Black and creating a life of his own. It is very simple: Orion is jealous of his son for being able to do what he could not, though he would never admit it not even to himself.

If you’ve made it this far, GOOD FOR YOU AND I REALLY APPRECIATE YOU READING THIS SHIT <3 <3 <3

#{ royal flames will carve the path in chaos | about }

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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New world news from Time: Tens of Thousands Are Protesting in Belarus. Here What’s Behind the Uprising Against President Lukashenko

For over a week, tens of thousands of people have protested across Belarus over disputed elections on Aug. 9 after which Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s longest serving leader, claimed a sixth term as president. Thousands of people, including factory workers, police officers and TV presenters, have gone on strike to join the protests and call for the President—who has ruled the ex-Soviet country of 9.5 million—since 1994 to step down.

“Belarus has not seen protests like this since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says Matthew Frear, a Belarus expert at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Clashes with riot police have left at least two dead, hundreds injured and at least 6,700 arrested. Authorities have launched a severe crackdown in the capital city, Minsk, where police have deployed stun grenades and rounds of rubber bullets and drove a van into crowds. According to Amnesty International, detained protesters have been subjected to “widespread torture.”

Fighting for his political future like never before, Lukashenko has tried to show he hasn’t lost the support of the nation—but hasn’t had much success. When Lukashenko toured the Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant on Monday and told the crowd, “you workers have always supported the president,” the workers chanted “Go away!”

Later the same day, during a visit to another factory, Lukashenko offered to change the constitution. “We’ll put the changes to a referendum, and I’ll hand over my constitutional powers. But not under pressure or because of the street,” he said. The opposition says he’s made empty promises like this before.

What happened with Belarus’ election?

On Aug. 10, official results handed Lukashenko 80.1% of the vote. His main rival, Svetlana Tikhonovskaya, a political newcomer and former teacher, only won 10.1%. She rejected the outcome, insisting that she would have won support ranging from 60% to 70% had votes been properly counted. “It’s difficult to say what the result would have been because the entire process was rigged — some of the votes cast for Lukashenko were faked,” says Frear. “But in some polling stations, where it was done more fairly, she did receive up to 80% of the votes. The only way to know is to hold new free and fair elections” he adds.

Dubbed ‘Europe’s Last Dictatorship’ by George W Bush in 2005, Lukashenko’s regime has banned opinion polls, jailed opposition figures and conducted elections that were called “severely flawed” by the European Commission. “The last free and fair elections were in 1994,” says Frear.

Three months ahead of the Aug. 9 elections, authorities jailed three opposition candidates and barred them from running, including Tikhanovskaya’s husband, a popular YouTuber and opposition figure, Sergei Tikhanovsky at the end of May.

Hours after denouncing the elections, Tikhanosvkaya fled to neighboring Lithuania, where she had previously evacuated her children ahead of the elections. In a YouTube video, she said she made the “very difficult decision independently,” adding that “children are the main thing in life” and that the political unrest is not worth anyone losing their life. She has since told protesters not to “stay on the sidelines” and to rally peacefully. “We have always said that we need to defend our choice only by lawful, non violent means,” she said in another video on Aug. 14.

Vikor Drachev—TASS/Getty ImagesA striking worker of Belaruskaly, Belarus’ major producer of potash fertilizers.

Why are workers protesting?

Protests have emerged across Belarus since June amid anger over the jailing of opposition figures, economic stagnation and Lukashenko’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which he dubbed a “psychosis” that could be cured by a vodka and a sauna visit despite recently contracting the illness himself. Since the election results, more than a dozen protests have emerged in towns and cities over the disputed election results. Unofficial estimates for a protest in the capital on Sunday ranged between 100,00 and 220,000 people. Thousands of people rallied last night in Minsk for a ninth consecutive night since Lukashenko declared victory.

Workers have taken to the streets with a variety of demands, including stopping the police violence and holding new elections.

Videos and photos shared on social media in recent days showed workers at several state-run enterprises walking off the job and telling their bosses they would not go back to work until police stop beating up demonstrators and authorities release the thousands of protestors detained since the election. Police officers and members of the special forces (Omon) have announced they were quitting on social media. In one video, a security officer burns his uniform in a show of defiance.

Several journalists and TV presenters have also gone on strike, demanding that state media cover the protests objectively, says Katia Glod, a London-based independent expert on Belarus and former consultant at European Endowment for Democracy, a think tank in Brussels. The state media is “complete propaganda,” Glod says. “It has portrayed the protests as ‘riots.'”

At least six presenters have left the state-run broadcasting company, Belarus-1 (BT) channel, in the past week, including Andrei Makayonak, a host on the Good Morning Belarus program, who resigned on Aug. 12. In an interview with daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus, he said: “Before I always remained neutral, because I was sure that when the situation is not very good, there must be a positive person who supports everyone with his smile.” He said that in the country’s current climate, his smile feels “rather blasphemous” and no longer “inspires the audience.”

Evgeny Maloletka—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesAlexander Lukashenko, Belaruss president, gestures while giving a speech during a rally of his supporters in Independence Square in Minsk, Belarus, on, Aug. 16, 2020.

How has Lukashenko responded to the protests?

On Aug. 14—the sixth consecutive day of protests—Lukashenko called the demonstrators foreign-backed revolutionaries who are trying to destabilize the country. “Don’t throw yourselves onto the streets. You must understand that you are being used, and our children are being used, like cannon fodder,” he said in a televised address.

Since the elections, people in Belarus report intermittently losing access to the Internet, social networks and messaging apps, triggering suspicions among protesters that the government is using technology as a means of stifling dissent. Lukashenko, however, has denied that the government is involved and claimed the Internet was being disconnected from abroad. “In the past, the authorities have blocked the sites of opposition candidates. But a full Internet shutdown has never happened before,” Frear says.

In the context of a deep recession and the coronavirus crisis, Lukashenko will need to borrow a lot of money from foreign governments, says Glod. “His loss of legitimacy threatens his ability to get money from Western institutions and that’s what bothers him,” she adds.

Belarus has long relied on Russian energy subsidies worth billions of dollars each year shore up its largely state-controlled economy. But over the past year, the Kremlin has ramped up pressure on Belarus to accept closer political and economic ties by ramping up energy prices and cutting subsidies. But Lukashenko has rejected several of Moscow’s proposals over the years for deeper integration, including a single currency.

Under siege from the West, Lukashenko appears to be turning to his Russian neighbor for support. After a phone conversation with Valadmir Putin, Lukashenko declared on Aug. 15 that Putin had agreed to provide “comprehensive security assistance” against the protests. Lukashenko didn’t specify details but he said that “when it comes to the military component, we have an agreement with [Russia],” referring to a treaty the countries signed back in 1999 that was supposed to create a “unified state.” The treaty was never fully implemented and in recent years, the countries’ relations have worsened as Lukashenko has pushed against Moscow’s calls for deeper economic and political ties.

Lukashenko wants Putin to bolster his number of riot police, Glod says. “He is particularly worried about a lack of police,” she says. But there’s no guarantee will Russia provide such support, Frear says. “Lukashenko might be trying to scare the opposition or to corner Russia into providing support,” he says.

A Kremlin statement on 15 Aug. made no mention of providing security assistance but expressed confidence that all the problems will be resolved soon.

How have other world leaders responded?

The elections and police brutality have drawn widespread condemnation abroad. President Trump said on Aug. 18: “it doesn’t seem like it’s too much democracy there in Belarus” and that he would like to talk to Russia “at an appropriate time” in the wake of the unrest. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Aug. 10 the vote was “not free and fair” and denounced “ongoing violence against protesters and the detention of opposition supporters,” while the U.K. announced on Aug. 17, that it did not accept” the “fraudulent” Belarus presidential vote.

After Aug.14 emergency talks, the European Union announced it would impose sanctions targeting Belarusian officials responsible for the brutal crackdown and election fraud. “What happened in Belarus in the last few days is completely unacceptable and calls for a clear reaction of the E.U.,” Germany’s Haiko Maas said during a press conference the same day.

The E.U. first placed sanctions on Belarus in 2004, and tightened them in 2011 over human rights abuses and election fraud. Many sanctions, including those targeting arms companies and travel bans were lifted in 2016 after the E.U. cited progress in improving the rule of law.

The latest sanctions are unlikely to bother Lukashenko, analysts say. “They’re limited and targeted. They won’t bring the country down,” says Frear.

“The E.U. is in a difficult position. It has to stand by its values so it cannot just ignore the fraud and post election violence” Glod says. “But they don’t want to push Lukashenko towards Russia.”

Evgeny Maloletka—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesProtesters unfurl a banner in the colors of the former Belarus national flag as they call for the resignation of President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk, Belarus, on, Aug. 16, 2020.

What could happen next?

It looks like neither Lukashenko nor the protesters intend on backing down, analysts say. “He is a person who never compromises. He sees it as a weakness,” Glod sayd.

At the same time, experts doubt he can rely on Russian intervention to repress the protests. The Kremlin’s priority is to keep Belarusians on its side says Frear, but “if it openly intervenes on behalf of Lukashenko and embroils itself in a violent crackdown, it could lose the support of Belarusians.”

It would also be very costly for Putin. “He would need enormous financial resources to sustain Belarus’s collapsing economy. It’s also unclear how that could play out domestically,” says Glod. Putin’s popularity has suffered a historic blow in recent months following the economic fallout from the COVID-19 crisis, with ratings dropping to 60% in July.

The future will either see “an even more bloody crackdown or long war of attrition where neither side—the authorities or protesters—stands down,” says Frear, drawing parallels with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong.

Protesters are hoping for another election. And a crackdown continues to fail and mass protests continue to rage, “there’s more chance Lukashenko will cede” to those calls, Frear says.

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best-underrated-anime · 11 months ago

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Best Underrated Anime Group D Round 2: #D5 vs #D8

#D5: Three brothers work together to stop an ancient evil

#D8: Singer idol android goes back in time to save humanity

Details and poll under the cut!

#D5: Laughing Under the Clouds (Donten ni Warau)

youtube

Summary:

In the 11th year of the Meiji Era, the end of the samurai shogunate and the prohibition of swords has left Japan with lasting scars. Displeased by these recent changes, many former samurai plot against the new government, inciting a wave of bloodshed. To counter this movement, the government constructs a colossal prison in the middle of Lake Biwa.

Unofficially assigned to help the police arrest criminals, Tenka Kumou also serves as a ferryman to the Lake Biwa prison with the help of his two younger siblings: the ambitious Soramaru and the enthusiastic Chuutarou. Together with the former Fuma ninja Shirasu Kinjou, the Kumou brothers live a frugal and joyful life mostly dedicated to studying and training.

However, behind this relatively uneventful daily routine, the specter of the “Orochi” curse is starting to spread its shadow over the city of Oumi. According to legend, every three hundred years, Orochi reincarnates in a human vessel—and it is believed that this is the harbinger of an imminent catastrophe. As various groups clash in search of Orochi’s vessel, some aim to seal the curse, while others have darker plans in motion.

Propaganda:

I found this series absolutely entrancing when I originally watched it, the portrayal of the characters and themes is really interesting to watch.

It tells a fantastic story about trying to defeat a legendary evil that can corrupt those around it to do its biding, all the while mixing in comedy and really heartfelt moments between family. For a 12 episode series they did a really good job of tying up any loose ends and finishing the plot, some things could have been expanded upon a bit more, but for what it is they producers did a wonderful job.

The series might not be the most groundbreaking anime ever, but it does have some lovely moments and explorations of its characters. I really like the themes of family, and wanting to do anything you can to help the people you love, it’s always nice to see and I think it’s done really well in this anime.

Trigger Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Cruelty/Violence/Gore, Suicide.

#D8: Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song

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Summary:

When highly evolved AIs set out to eradicate mankind, the carnage that ensues fills the air with the stench of fresh blood and burning bodies. In a desperate bid to prevent the calamity from ever occurring, a scientist bets everything on a remnant from the past.

Turning the clock back a hundred years, AIs are already an integral part of human society, programmed with specific missions meant to be carried out for their entire course of operation. Vivy, the first ever autonomous AI, is a songstress tasked with spreading happiness through her voice. In a theme park where she hardly ever gets a proper audience, she strives to pour her heart out into her performances, bound to repeat it day after day—that is, until an advanced AI from the future appears before her and enlists her help in stopping a devastating war a hundred years in the making. With no time to process the revelation that flips her world upside down, Vivy is catapulted into a century-long journey to avert the violent history yet to come.

Propaganda:

Most first think that this anime is an idol show. I promise you, it is NOT. Quite far from it. Vivy is regrettably underrated despite having great animation—just watch the fight scenes. It has the best of songs that will get stuck in your head for a long time. Character growth for characters - you will adore them. It even won some recognition from anime awards, yet no one talks about it. You have to watch it at least once and appreciate how this anime is made with love as it talks about experiences that make us human. You will be surprised how well the storytelling is.

Trigger Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Cruelty/Violence/Gore, Suicide

When reblogging and adding your own propaganda, please tag me @best-underrated-anime so that I’ll be sure to see it.

If you want to criticize one of the shows above to give the one you’re rooting for an advantage, then do so constructively. I do not tolerate groundless hate or slander on this blog. If I catch you doing such a thing in the notes, be it in the tags or reblogs, I will block you.

Know one of the shows above and not satisfied with how they’re presented in this tournament? Just fill up this form, where you can submit revisions for taglines, propaganda, trigger warnings, and/or video.

#anime #best underrated anime #polls #poll tournament #tournament #anime tournament #animation #group stage #group stage round 2 #tournament polls #group d #laughing under the clouds #donten ni warau #vivy: fluorite eye's song #vivy

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fapangel · 7 years ago

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Seeing that war is going to happen, but I am betting on that the U.S. mainland ISN'T going to be nuked. But still, what would likely be the backlash effect we would be hit by it? economic instability/collapse? Fuel shortages? Marshal Law? What do you think will happen once we cross the Rubicon?

I think you’re drastically over-estimating the effects of this possible war.

For starters, none of those terrifying things you mentioned hit the US Homeland, even during the Second World War itself. Save fuel shortages, and that was due to deliberate rationing. And even that wouldn’t be so bad - we actually maintain a strategic oil reserve with a 727 million barrel capacity just to ensure our ability to operate our military in times of war - they’ve actually sold off some oil from it at times to alleviate high gas prices some years back when gas prices were stupidly high. That greatly insulates both our military and our civilian market against any short-term disruption (a closing of the Hormuz Strait by Iran, for instance,) and given that even WWII didn’t produce any serious damage to American domestic infrastructure, it’s highly unlikely any modern conflict (which will be much smaller scale) will manage to do what the 20th century’s greatest conflict could not. We will probably suffer more domestic infrastructure damage from cyberattacks alone - Chinese military hackers were caught red-handed targeting US domestic infrastructure. They tend to play with the settings to verify that they’ve achieved control of the system, then they quietly log out - they’re almost certainly building a catalog of vulnerable and pre-compromised systems that can then be re-visited - and configured with settings that will ensure physical destruction of the industrial hardware - at a later date, in time of war. This isn’t academic; Russian military hackers damaged a Ukrainian power plant recently.

With that said, however, the total impact of these attacks are highly unlikely to be devastating or even seriously problematic - the nation is simply too large, and the destruction such attacks can wreak, though serious in many cases, can’t compare to hitting a power plant with a cruise missile or a bomb. Their advantage will be primarily psychological; the threat that “we can reach out and touch you,” but historically that has never worked. England bombed Berlin to “break the will of the German people,” and Germany bombed London to return the favor, but neither side broke, did they? Attacks on the homeland make a war personal, giving previously disinterested citizens (”Vietnam has nothing to do with us, why are we over there,”) a personal emotional stake in it. For all their mastery of propaganda and misinformation, Russia and China use it first and foremost to control their own people, which leaves them with some inevitable blind spots when they target Americans. Habit and established procedure is hard to break, after all - much less their innately different view of how people think and are best governed (i.e. controlled.)

There’s more vectors available for direct kinetic attack of the American homeland than there were in WWII, of course - such as cruise missiles launched from submarines - but that would be a serious and very dangerous escalation akin to running up to a dragon and kicking it in the balls. The United States would probably avoid escalating to domestic targets itself - the war, like so many Cold War proxy conflicts before it, would be fought in the “crossing ground” of the Baltics and the South China Sea - unless our foes escalated against our own soil first. Given that America has a vastly superior ability to project power against their domestic territory than they can against ours, this is not a game they want to play.

Wider global knock-on effects are hard to consider - especially since I’m no economist, or anything - but any short term disruption would likely be a wash. We’d suffer from losing trade with China, but at the same time, we’d also gain substantially. In fact, with how automated manufacturing of any sort is these days, China would probably come out far worse than us, because while automation would mitigate our economic gains (not as much people put back to work at US Steel, for instance,) the Chinese, who powered their economic rise by tapping their vast domestic market of cheap labor, would lose a lot of jobs, in both absolute and comparative terms. iPhones would be even more expensive without FoxConn’s slave labor force in China, though I hear they’ve located a new source of desperately poor unemployed people to exploit. There’d be a short-term loop-de-loop in the stock market and many international companies supply chains no matter how you look at it, but long-term would look better - companies have been souring on China for a while now due to their state-backed policy of “fleece the round-eyes for everything you can get, and once you’ve stolen their technology wholesale, kick them out of the country penniless while you make bank on their product.” For that reason a lot of companies are turning to India, which has many of the same problems (local/municipal corruption, etc.,) but is actively trying to rectify them, rather than making it state policy to fuck everyone not Chinese for the benefit of China. I think the long-term economic shifts are the most significant thing to look at because the war itself won’t last too long - it’s going to be fast, violent and decisive. China and Russia both need a quick knockout victory - I highly doubt this “hybrid war” shit is going to fly on NATO clay, not with Trump and Mattis there to drop the fucking hammer on them. Even if NATO doesn’t invoke article 5 (extremely unlikely,) the invaded nation will be screaming bloody blue murder for help, which is all the excuse we’ll need to roll in alone - and we can roll in alone, need be. China’s situation is self-explanatory - much like Japan in 1941, the best they can hope for is establishing MY HEMISPHERE ANGOLOS GET OUT REEEEE and even if they manage that, they just don’t have the assets needed to repel a full-scale push by the US once we muster our strength, especially after inevitable losses taken while defeating our local forces (7th fleet.)

Disruption to international oil supply is the biggest threat, because of economic disruption to Europe that will then affect us downstream - not because of any domestic threat. America imports 40% of our oil from Canada, 11% from Saudi Arabia, 9% from Venezuela, 8% from Mexico and 4% from Colombia... and in 2015, we only imported 24% of our total oil consumption. 75% of our oil we produce our own damn selves - we’re the third largest producer in the world - and over half of that remaining quarter is imported from nations close to us - or at least, not in the Middle East. And that Middle Eastern nation, Saudi Arabia, is one of our favored allies, with a formidable military that uses a lot of our nicest toys. The two biggest reasons we’re allied with the Saudis, despite them being well-known bastards, is that they give us extensive regional bases (with which we can protect the Strait of Hormuz and generally come down hard on anyone kicking up shit in the Middle East’s oil-producing regions,) and because the Saudis have a very vested interest in not rocking the OPEC boat themselves, and would be very likely to use their military to defend the stability of the world’s oil supply, given that they’re extremely dependent on that. The Suez Canal is the other major chokepoint in that area, and it’s controlled by Egypt, which has the biggest army in the region, and likely the most competent of all Arab armies in the Middle East.

The only thing that can really change any of this is the use of tac-nukes, as that could inflict horrific infrastructure damage to these crucial regions that would seriously damage the international economy for decades to come. However, I think it highly unlikely that those will get tossed around - for the simple fact that the United States has plenty to play with, too. If you’re wondering why those B-61 freefall bombs haven’t been removed from Incirlik yet, despite the questionable wisdom of keeping nukes inside an increasingly hostile and Russian-aligned Turkey, look no further than Russia’s recent penchant for rattling their tac-nuke saber to compensate for their weak conventional forces. They’ve gone so far as to suggest “de-escalating” a conventional conflict by striking with tac-nukes first. They’re full of shit, but it doesn’t matter if you believe them or not - what matters is that they believe us when we say that trying to nuke us, even with tac-nukes, will be met with nukes in return. Our tac-nuke arsenal is old - non-stealthy air-launched cruise missiles and B-61 freefall bombs - but even if the war kicks off before the B-61 is retrofitted with a GPS guidance kit and integrated with the F-35 for short-range, high-speed stealth strikes, the fact remains that we’ve got the ability to ensure air superiority - if not outright air supremacy - needed to employ even our current weapons with relative impunity. An F-15E performing a delayed lay-down delivery on the deck will do just fine. Once the Russians cross the nuclear threshold, we’re obligated to respond in kind, because failure to do so would encourage many more attacks of that sort. Demonstrating an unwillingness to retaliate leaves them with everything to gain and nothing to lose by nuking us.

Worse, Russia’s saber-rattling might just backfire. They’ve been helicopter-dicking since last year about moving Iskander-M tactical ballistic missiles to Kalingrad, and helicopter-dicking harder because this missile is technically nuclear-capable. TBMs like the Iskander are key to Russia’s modern A2/AD strategy, same as they are for China - they allow them to attack sites a good 150 or even 200 miles deep in enemy territory, just like a cruise missile - but a ballistic missile not only arrives much faster, but is also much, much harder to shoot down by air defenses, making these weapons extremely useful for Russia and China, who don’t have nearly as many fighters, airborne jammers or other support equipment to back up their cruise missile strikes with.

Unfortunately, after hurfblurfing for years about how they’ll tac-nuke us at the drop of a hat, the instant those warheads are detected in-flight, they’re likely to trigger an American response that assumes they’re nuclear, not conventional. And that could land Russia’s ass in much hotter water than they might want. If all the incoming warheads are destroyed - or even only some of them - by our ABM defenses, it’ll still leave open the question of some of the destroyed ones were nuclear, and the remainder conventional, or simply decoys to aid the nuclear weapons penetration. Because of the seriousness of it, we’d have to assume the worst, and that means that NATO forces would be standing there on a nuclear hair trigger. All this constrains Russia’s ability to use one of their best asymmetric weapons against us by significantly increasing the political and strategic risk of using them - either a a first salvo or a later follow-up, they equate a much bigger escalation than they would without the potential nuclear angle.

So, no, anon, I don’t think the very possible future wars with Russia and China are going to lead to the kind of nightmare scenarios you’re describing. They’re not going to be fun, but simply put, neither Russia nor China really has the strength to scrap with us for long, and there’s a lot of things mitigating against the conflict suffering snowball-style escalation into a more damaging limited nuclear exchange.

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