#union civil

[kropotkindersurprise]

James Baldwin, talking about living his life based on observable fact, instead of white liberal promises. [link]

[pencilscratchins]

i have reached the part of the steddie hyperfixation where i make them domesticated men in their 50s. having a blast! (twitter) [ID in ALT text]

[socialjusticeinamerica]

They left out the part about slaughtering herds of wild horses in the western states. The cruelty is the point.

[shipperwolf1]

The Guardian: Southern Poverty Law Center workers vote to remove CEO after ‘inhumane’ layoffs

Empty words won't give us or the communities we served their livelihoods back.

Sign in support of SPLC's laid-off staff

[dear-ao3]

robert e lee was a fucking idiot and a terrible general and im not sorry for saying so

[canisalbus]

Just the thought of a wedding between Vasco and Machete is mind-numbingly sweet. They deserve the best one possible.

.

[exquisite-peculiarity]

I saw a poll asking about divorce, and now I'm curious, how many of y'all are or have been married?

This doesn't seem like a very married website to me, but let's see.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When parties fail, movements step up

This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

Does anyone like the American two party system? The parties are opaque, private organizations, weak institutions that are prone to capture and corruption, and gerrymandering's "safe seats" means that the real election often takes place in the party's smoke-filled rooms, when a sure-thing candidate is selected:

https://doctorow.medium.com/weak-institutions-a26a20927b27

But there doesn't seem to be any way to fix it. For one thing, the two parties are in charge of any reform, and they're in no hurry to put themselves out of business. It's effectively impossible for a third party to gain any serious power in the USA, and that's by design. After the leftist Populists party came within a spitting distance of power in the 1890s, the Dems and Repubs got together and cooked the system, banning fusion voting and erecting other structural barriers.

The Nader and Perot campaigns were doomed from the outset, in other words. Either candidate could have been far more popular than the D and R on the ballot, and they still would have lost. It's how the deck is stacked, and to unstack it, reformers would need to take charge of at least one – and probably both – of the parties.

But that's not cause for surrender – it's a call to action. In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal) sets out another locus of power, one with the potential to deliver control over the party to its base: social movements:

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/ordinary-people-by-the-millions

It's been done before. The parties are routinely transformed by power-shifts within their internal coalitions: since 1970, corporate Dems have consistently pushed the party to the right, making it the power of white-collar professionals and relying on working people showing up and marking their ballots with a D because they have "nowhere else to go."

Bill Clinton was the most successful of these corporate raiders, delivering the parts of the Reagan Revolution that Reagan himself could never have managed: dismantling tariffs and bank regulations, passing the crime bill and welfare "reform." He came within a whisper of (partially) privatizing Social Security.

This set in motion the forces that made Trumpism possible: when Dems told deindustrialized workers to "learn to code" and blamed them for the destruction of their communities, it opened a space for Make America Great Again, the (empty) workerist rhetoric of the GOP. The Dems' plan of putting "really smart people" in charge and letting them run things was a (predictable) disaster. "Really smart" isn't the same as "infallible" and really smart people can be spooked or bulled into doing the wrong thing – like Obama "foaming the runways" for the banks with the houses of mortgage holders, and leaving the bankers responsible for the Great Financial Crisis unscathed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

"Really smart people" can't get us out of this mess. Instead, we need the kind of muscular political action – the "whirlwind" – that characterized FDR's New Deal: "complete reformation of the banking industry.. just about every other industry as well. Regulation. Social Security. Public works. Antitrust. Soil conservation."

FDR got there by alienating his former classmates and refusing the go-slow entreaties of his cronies. He got there because there was a mass social movement that made him do it ("I want to do it, now make me do it"):

https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/i-agree-with-you-i-want-to-do-it-now-make-me-do-it/

Every time in US history where one of the political party duopoly listened to its base, it was because of a mass social movement: the farmers' movement (1890s), labor (1930s), civil rights and antiwar (1960s). As Frank says:

Social movements succeed. They build and they change the intellectual climate and then, when the crisis comes, they make possible things like agrarian reform or the New Deal or the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s.

Today, we see the seeds of those social movements: the new union movement. Black Lives Matter. Neobrandeisians with their "hipster antitrust." These are the movements that are creating "ideas lying around": ideas that, in time of crisis, can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink:

https://doctorow.medium.com/ideas-lying-around-33a28901a7ae

They are setting in motion another transformation of the Democratic Party, from its top-down, "really smart people" model to a bottom-up, people-powered one, kept in check by movements, not party bosses. As Frank says, "They require the mass participation of ordinary people. Without that, I am afraid that nothing is possible."

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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/2023/08/17/popular-front-of-judea/#speaking-frankly

[revoltedstates]

George L. Hyde, Co. C, 2nd Wisconsin Infantry, Iron Brigade. Via Wisconsin Volunteers.

[benandstevesposts]

CALIFORNIA POLICE OFFICER IN SPOTLIGHT FOR BODY SLAMMING LADY OUTSIDE GROCERY STORE

A police officer’s violent actions in southern California are being investigated after video footage showed the white cop brutalizing an unarmed Black woman for the apparent offense of recording officers detaining her husband.

The video footage recorded by a witness began by showing the woman holding a cell phone and filming officers handcuffing her husband, who can be heard repeatedly asking “why” he was being detained outside the supermarket in Lancaster.

After two officers struggled to handcuff the husband, one walked directly to the wife. When the camera follows the officer, he’s shown grabbing the wife by the back of her neck before violently flinging her to the ground.

The person recording can be heard yelling for the cop to “get off of her” and not to hit her to no avail.

The cop is next shown kneeling on the wife’s neck, evoking horrific imagery from Derek Chavin’s police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

As with the woman’s husband, the officer struggled to place her in handcuffs even though she wasn’t resisting.

Her husband can be heard in the background pleading for the officer to stop. He also said she has cancer. Neither claim prevented the officer from accosting the woman standing at least 20 feet away from the officers when they were handcuffing her husband.

To view the video, you may visit the original report by visiting the site it appeared here.

UPDATED REPORT ADDED REGARDING AREA WHERE ALLEGED ASSAULT TOOK PLACE

[rosie-kairi]

Found it!

[useless-catalanfacts]

2nd February 2024. Photos from Vilaweb.

Demonstration in front of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (the highest court of the Spanish judiciary system in Catalonia) in Barcelona in support of Dani Gallardo, a young Spanish anarchist who is sentenced to prison because the took part in a peaceful demonstration held in Madrid (Spain's capital city) in favour of Catalan people's right to self-determination and against the Spanish police's violence against Catalan people.

We have explained Dani's case before, you can read it in this post:

Dani has been sentenced guilty to send a message. Until his case, more than 4,200 Catalan people had been sentenced guilty for their involvement in the 2017 Catalan independence referendum or the protests that followed it. The Spanish judiciary system has proven that they won't stop at punishing Catalan people, they also sent the police to beat up the protestors who demonstrated for Catalonia in Madrid (Spain) and they're also jailing a Spanish man for his solidarity.

Dani was sentenced guilty of public disorder and attempt against authority with made-up claims that had been fabricated hours before he even got arrested. The Spanish police already planned to arrest people and blame them for this even before the event happened. Dani spent 13 months in pre-trial jail, then he was released for some time, and now has received the order to go to prison for 2 years and 11 months more.

Cases like this is why there is a demand for an amnesty. After the last elections to the Spanish government, the PSOE party needed the support of other parties to get enough votes to form government. One of the must-have demands of the Catalan political parties was an amnesty law (amnesty laws are not uncommon in Spain) that would cancel the punishments of people who have been found guilty of political crimes related to the independence movement since 2017, because none of these thousands of people committed real harmful crimes. This law is currently being negotiated, but the Spanish parties are trying to write it in a way that will leave as many people out of the amnesty as possible. At the same time, the Spanish judiciary system continues accusing new people of terrorism for attending peaceful political demonstrations.

For example, two democratically-elected pro-independence politicians (Puigdemont and Wagensberg) are being accused of terrorism for supposedly calling for people to protest in the Barcelona airport, a protest that was completely peaceful and which was called by a civil society organization and not by these politicians. But they're influential, so Spain looks for any way to punish them. How are the Spanish judiciaries claiming that Puigdemont and Wagensberg should be sentenced guilty of terrorism for an action where there was no terrorism? The Spanish judges' imagination has no limits when it comes to sentencing Catalans and Basques. They are saying that it's terrorism because some of the protestors had weapons. What weapons? Fire extinguishers, bottles, and the metal carts that people use to carry their luggage:

Because there were fire extinguishers and luggage carts in the airport and people brought their own water, a completely peaceful protest that happened there is terrorism. The worst part is that it doesn't outrage or surprise us anymore, because we're so used to this nonsense.

[coolthingsguyslike]

[shipperwolf1]

OOPS! DROPPED THIS.

AND THIS.

AND THIS.

[gaypirate420]

Those Twilight fans trying to justify SMeyer decision to make one of her main characters a confederate:

[archiveofcyp]

Coloured photographs of a celebration held by the Union of Cyprus Youth for the Wounded from the war on Lebanon while receiving treatment in Cyprus.

Image source and information by Samar Ozrail, "The Palestine Red Crescent Society Collection". Archival Inventory. 30 April- 5 June 2018. The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive.