#captive state

[fanofspooky]

Scream King - John Goodman

[geenawrites]

GEEENAWRITES: 2024 IN REVIEW

[bsky link] + [wordpress] - December 30th-31st marks the end of 2024. A long time ago, I would've begged for the next year to make haste and pull me from the misery of the day-to-day. But with age sometimes comes wisdom. 2024 was not a great year, but the idea of a "great year" seems wholly juvenile, if not an illusory concept. As meaningless as ranking any given moment in your life in a Top Five or Best of List. Life is not without its miseries; every year comes with creative ups and downs. This is to say that 2024 was no more a "great year" than the last. It stands to reason that until the issues that brought despair in the here and now are ended, they will continue to persist. So, the point is less about lamenting the terrors and more about figuring out what you, as an individual, can do about it within your pocket of reality. The only way out is through, so keep going. But! In the meantime, listed below are eight articles I wrote (or republished) for GeeenaWrites (dot com) and SuperJump Magazine in 2024. This is not the totality of my work, but it's just some of the work that I'm proud of.

Resident Evil at 20: Reimagining 'Ground Zero' - Published April 2024: A retrospective on the 20th Anniversary of Capcom's Resident Evil REMake for the Nintendo GameCube and Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil adaptation starring Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez.

We Gotta Talk About: Captive State (2019) - Published December 2024, written in 2019. An essay about counter-insurgency against American fascism as depicted in the political sci-fi thriller Captive State, inspired by The Battle of Algiers and Army of Shadows.

The Cat Comes Back: The Comfort of Early Edition's Supernatural Feline - Published September 2024: More review than retrospective or essay, Early Edition is a very 90s fantasy series about a dog-person who gets stuck with an immortal cat that predicts the future with a newspaper. It's corny as hell, but I love it.

I Take My Miasma Lean, My Liberals Black, and My Despair at Three - Published August 2024: This past Election period taught how quickly the working class will turn against its peers to capitulate to the interests of the elites and the political class. To see it happen in real-time is fucking demoralizing, though.

Temporarily Embarrassed by the Grift - Published July 2024: To be a socialist who pursues a future where the concept of money and capitalism is regulated to the dustbin of history is to live in a constant state of rage. Rage at the poverty we're living in and rage, watching humans beg for the right to live.

Spaces in Sharp Relief (I) - Republished Jan 2024: An autopsy of a twenty-some year experience within vitriolic fanspaces whose negatives ultimately outweigh the formative positive experiences. Because nothing has really changed.

Spaces in Sharp Relief (II) - Republished January 2024: “[…]I encourage every community to quit thinking you need to be fair to unfair voices. Get the rot out and you’ll have a healthier community.” (@AmazonChique)

To Live and Thrive in Baltimore - Republished January 2024: "At a certain age, you understand the reputation Baltimore City has as some lawless, violent city full of thugs is one by design."

[f-yeahbendaniels]

My Top Five Favorite Ben Daniels Characters (Performances in Underwhelming Works): 5. Daniel Larkin - Captive State (2019).

[raurquiz]

#happybirthday #jonathanmajors #actor #TimeKeepers #HeWhoRemains #VictorTimely #KangtheConqueror #Loki #AntManandtheWaspQuantumania #Hostiles #OutofBlue #CaptiveState #TheLastBlackManinSanFrancisco #Jungleland #Da5Bloods #LovecraftCountry #TheHarderTheyFall #Devotion #creed3

[anarchic-miscellany]

Tales from Physical Media: I own a copy of "Captive State" It came out a few years ago (2019), from the director of the first of the new "Planet of the Apes" movies, and that Marky Mark remake of "The Gambler". It had a fairly big name cast (the lead was Ashton Sanders fresh from "Moonlight", the ever wonderful John Goodman; the ever reliable Vera Farmiga; a pre-fame and very much pre-conviction, star on the rise Jonathan Majors, and smaller parts for Colson Baker and James Ransone, as well as Alan Ruck and Kevin Dunn) and was an interesting enough quirk and take on an alien invasion premise. And you can't get it on DVD. Like, now I understand (yeah, Jonathan Majors, yikes) but like even before that entire shitshow: you just couldn't. Bigger bombs and weirder flops/forgotten misfires were everywhere on DVD and found their audience. But here, this? Nope, not a peep, and now even harder. I had to import a copy from Italy. Just an odd little quirk.

[variousqueerthings]

i confess im only half-watching captive state but we do get ben daniels in pain taping up a wound in a backstreet alley

[verydeity]

[wearenotjustnumbers2]

Meet Mohammed Nazzal, a Palestinian child. He was in administrative arrest (this means he can stay held captive without charge for as long as israel decides, also look it up for better understanding) without charge or trial in Israeli occupation prisons and was released yesterday as part of the hostages exchange.

"They shattered metal bars on me, beating me non-stop on my head, broke my hands. They starved me."

[stillsmybeatingheart]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

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[folklorespring]

Mariana, a civilian, was taken hostage by russia back in 2022 in Mariupol. UN and ICRC helped russia to commit this crime. Today Mariana and 74 more Ukrainians came back home from captivity.

According to her mother, Mariana experienced a lot of torture in captivity - she was starved, beaten, and abused in other ways. Due to the conditions of captivity, the girl's health worsened: respiratory tract diseases and tonsillitis turned into chronic bronchitis.

In video she says "Mommy, I'm home. Mommy, I'm in Ukraine".

[panimoonchild]

Our people come back home

The 53rd exchange, which began on June 25 with the release of 90 Ukrainian defenders, has been completed today.

Ukraine managed to return 10 civilians who had been illegally detained in the occupied territories and Belarus.

Here is a brief description of those who returned home:

▪️ Nikolay Shvets was accused by the Belarusian authorities of blowing up a Russian A-50 long-range radar detection aircraft at the airfield in Machulishchi.

▪️ Valeriy Matyushenko was detained by the occupiers in the Donetsk region in July 2017. For some time, he was held in the Donetsk torture chamber "Izolyatsia", and later he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In August last year, the Ombudsman wrote that Matyushenko's health condition was critical and the man needed to be released immediately.

▪️ UGCC priests Ivan Levitsky and Bohdan Geleta were detained by the occupation authorities in Berdiansk in November 2022. After the full-scale invasion, they remained in the temporarily occupied territory, where they continued to hold services for the faithful. The Russians accused the priests of illegal possession of weapons.

▪️ Olena Pekh is an art historian and researcher at the Horlivka Art Museum. She has been in Russian captivity since August 2018. In March 2020, she was sentenced to 13 years in prison.

- Don't cry, my daughter. I'm already in Ukraine, such nice guys met me and gave me a bouquet of flowers.

❤️‍🩹🫂

[geenawrites]

"Those with the most to lose invariably collaborate with an enemy, and those with the least to lose are the heroes, the ones who make the choice to fight back. It’s never as black and white as that, it’s never completely binary. But in this case, it’s the districts and areas of Chicago that are more on the margins of society, are less economically vibrant, that become the hotbeds of militancy. I think that’s looking to play to the truth. "— Rupert Wyatt

[f-yeahbendaniels]

My Top Five Favorite Ben Daniels Characters (Gothic/Horror) - Honorable Mentions: 1. Daniel Larkin - Captive State (2019).

[raurquiz]

#happybirthday #jonathanmajors #actor #TimeKeepers #HeWhoRemains #VictorTimely #KangtheConqueror #Loki #AntManandtheWaspQuantumania #Hostiles #OutofBlue #CaptiveState #TheLastBlackManinSanFrancisco #Jungleland #Da5Bloods #LovecraftCountry #TheHarderTheyFall #Devotion #creed3

[dontforgetukraine]

At the Venice Film Festival, director Olha Zhurba & team wear clothes embroidered with distances from Venice to Russian detention sites holding Ukrainian POWs. The message: The world must expose brutal realities of Russian captivity & stand against these atrocities.

Sources: Euromaidan Press, Olha Zhurba FB