#impune

[acostumbradoalfindelmundo]

Hoy estuve merendando con Ale y entendí que me tiene guardado en un pedacito de su eternidad. Es un lugar mágico donde yo puedo cambiar las veces que sea y ella jamás va a cambiar lo que siente por mí (siempre que no me convierta en un idiota, claro, no es esa leyenda urbana de amor incondicional). Me gustaría tener un lugar así para que la gente que quiero pueda esconderse de lo que sea, pero no soy Ale, soy mucho peor que ella, pongo a prueba a todas las personas cada vez que me las cruzo, las evalúo, sospecho que desde nuestro último encuentro pudieron moverse a esa zona en la que ya no somos tan compatibles, y cuanto más tiempo pasa sin que nos veamos o hablemos más sospecho. A veces esa sospecha (o el tiempo, o ambas) es tan grande que ya ni siquiera intento volver a ver a esa persona, rechazo cualquier propuesta de encuentro con excusas cada vez más fútiles. Me dedico a huir. Ojo que Ale no es ingenua, solo que no usa ningún test de mediocridemia ni ninguna de esas cosas exóticas que yo me invento. Ella es puro instinto, en nuestra merienda me lo dijo aunque no me lo dijo, lo que habló fue esto: me contó que fulano la criticó por tal cosa, y mengana por la misma cosa, y yo sin embargo nunca le había dicho nada al respecto. Aclaró (encima) que yo podría haberla criticado por lo que sea, y a diferencia de los otros ejemplos habría salido impune. “Vos siempre salís impune” me dijo con su envidia de turno “porque nosotros nos decimos las peores cosas y nos cagamos de la risa mientras que estos tarados abordan con total seriedad esas cosas horribles y a mi si me vas a hablar en serio de algo serio o tenes mucha confianza conmigo o sos un juez penal o la policía o algo de eso”. -Yo se que los ansiolíticos te dan sueño -le dije -pero ni eso te quita los ojos de merquera cuando empezás a hablar de la gente que odias. Se tapó la risa con la mano tatuada hasta la punta de los dedos, que es lo que siempre hace cuando tengo razón, o cuando me confirma que me tiene bien guardado en un lugar eterno. Suyo. Nuestro.

Acostumbradoalfindelmundolandia: linktr.ee/acostumbradoalfindelmundo

#acostumbrado al fin del mundo #ale #vinculos #eternidad #prueba #evaluar #evaluacion #compatibles #tiempo #sospechas #aceptacion #rechazo #mediocridemia #instinto #impune #inmune

[adribosch-fan]

25 de enero de 1997 ,NO SE OLVIDEN DE CABEZAS.

El 25 de enero de 1997 apareció dentro de un Ford Fiesta (alquilado por la revista Noticias) el cuerpo carbonizado, esposado y con dos tiros en el cráneo de José Luis Cabezas, en una cava de General Madariaga, a 11 kilómetros de Pinamar. El crimen ocurrió luego de que la revista para la que Cabezastrabajaba como reportero gráfico cubriera la investigación sobre la presunta implicación del…

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#1997 #Aniversario #Asesinato #Impune #José Luis Cabezas #Pinamar #Revista Noticias #Yabran

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How the NYPD defeated bodycams

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. When American patience for racial profiling in traffic stops reached a breaking point, cops rolled out dashcams. Dashcam footage went AWOL, or just recorded lots of racist, pretextual stops. Racial profiling continued.

Tasers and pepper spray were supposed to curb the undue use of force by giving cops an alternative to shooting dangerous-seeming people. Instead, we got cops who tasered and sprayed unarmed people and then shot them to pieces.

Next came bodycams: by indelibly recording cops' interactions with the public, body-worn cameras were pitched as a way to bring accountability to American law-enforcement. Finally, police leadership would be able to sort officers' claims from eyewitness accounts and figure out who was lying. Bad cops could be disciplined. Repeat offenders could be fired.

Police boosters insist that police violence and corruption are the result of "a few bad apples." As the saying goes, "a few bad apples spoil the bushel." If you think there are just a few bad cops on the force, then you should want to get rid of them before they wreck the whole institution. Bodycams could empirically identify the bad apples, right?

Well, hypothetically. But what if police leadership don't want to get rid of the bad apples? What if the reason that dashcams, tasers, and pepper spray failed is that police leadership are fine with them? If that were the case, then bodycams would turn into just another expensive prop for an off-Broadway accountability theater.

What if?

In "How Police Have Undermined the Promise of Body Cameras," Propublica's Eric Umansky and Umar Farooq deliver a characteristically thorough, deep, and fascinating account of the failure of NYPD bodycams to create the accountability that New York's political and police leadership promised:

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-police-undermined-promise-body-cameras

Topline: NYPD's bodycam rollout was sabotaged by police leadership and top NYC politicians. Rather than turning over bodycam footage to oversight boards following violent incidents, the NYPD suppresses it. When overseers are allowed to see the footage, they get fragmentary access. When those fragments reveal misconduct, they are forbidden to speak of it. When the revealed misconduct is separate from the main incident, it can't be used to discipline officers. When footage is made available to the public, it is selectively edited to omit evidence of misconduct.

NYPD policy contains loopholes that allow them to withhold footage. Where those loopholes don't apply, the NYPD routinely suppresses footage anyway, violating its own policies. When the NYPD violates its policies, it faces no consequences. When overseers complain, they are fired.

Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that's exactly what will happen. There is nothing about bodycams that makes them more resistant to capture than dashcams, tasers or pepper spray.

This is a problem across multiple police departments. Minneapolis, for example, has policies from before and after the George Floyd uprisings that require bodycam disclosure, and those policies are routinely flouted. Derek Chauvin, George Floyd's murderer, was a repeat offender and had been caught on bodycam kneeling on other Black peoples' necks. Chauvin once clubbed a 14 year old child into unconsciousness and then knelt on his neck for 15 minutes as his mother begged for her child's life. Chauvin faced no discipline for this and the footage was suppressed.

In Montgomery, Alabama, it took five years of hard wrangling to get access to bodycam footage after an officer sicced his attack dog on an unarmed Black man without warning. The dog severed the man's femoral artery and he died. Montgomery PD suppressed the footage, citing the risk of officers facing "embarrassment."

In Memphis, the notoriously racist police department was able to suppress bodycam disclosures until the murder of Tyre Nichols. The behavior of the officers who beat Nichols to death are a testament to their belief in their own impunity. Some officers illegally switched off their cameras; others participated in the beating in full view of the cameras, fearing no consequences.

In South Carolina, the police murder of Walter Scott was captured on a bystander's phone camera. That footage made it clear that Scott's uniformed killers lied, prompting then-governor Nikki Haley to sign a law giving the public access to bodycam footage. But the law contained a glaring loophole: it made bodycam footage "not a public record subject to disclosure." Nothing changed.

Bodycam footage does often reveal that killer cops lie about their actions. When a Cincinnati cop killed a Black man during a 2015 traffic-stop, his bodycam footage revealed that the officer lied about his victim "lunging at him" before he shot. Last summer, a Philadelphia cop was caught lying about the circumstances that led to him murdering a member of the public. Again, the officer claimed the man had "lunged at him." The cop's camera showed the man sitting peacefully in his own car.

Police departments across the country struggle with violent, lying officers, but few can rival the NYPD for corruption, violence, scale and impunity. The NYPD has its own "goon squad," the Strategic Response Group, whose leaked manual reveals how the secret unit spends about $100m/year training and deploying ultraviolent, illegal tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/07/cruelty-by-design/#blam-blam-blam

The NYPD's disciplinary records – published despite a panicked scramble to suppress them – reveal the NYPD's infestation with criminal cops who repeatedly break the law in meting out violence against the public:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/27/ip/#nypd-who

These cops are the proverbial bad apples, and they do indeed spoil the barrel. A 2019 empirical analysis of police disciplinary records show that corruption is contagious: when crooked cops are paired with partners who have clean disciplinary records, those partners become crooked, too, and the effect lasts even after the partnership ends:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023119879798

Despite the risk of harboring criminals in police ranks, the NYPD goes to extreme lengths to keep its worst officers on the street. New York City's police "union"'s deal with the city requires NYC to divert millions to a (once) secret slushfund used to pay high-priced lawyers to defend cops whose conduct is so egregious that the city's own attorneys refuse to defend them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/26/overfitness-factor/#heads-you-lose-tails-they-win

This is a good place for your periodic reminder that police unions are not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/28/afterland/#selective-solidarity

Indeed, despite rhetoric to the contrary, policing is a relatively safe occupation, with death rates well below the risks to roofers, loggers, or pizza delivery drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#onshore-havana-syndrome

The biggest risk to police officers – the single factor that significantly increased death rates among cops – is police unions themselves. Police unions successfully pressured cities across American to reject covid risk mitigation, from masking to vaccinations, leading to a wave of police deaths. "Suicide by cop" is very rare, but US officers committed "mass suicide by cop union":

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/us/police-covid-vaccines.html

But the story that policing is much more dangerous than it really is a useful one. It has a business-model. Military contractors who turn local Barney Fifes into Judge Dredd cosplayers with assault rifles, tanks and other "excess" military gear make billions from the tale:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#1033-1022

It's not just beltway bandits who love this story. For cops to be shielded from consequences for murdering the public, they need to tell themselves and the rest of us that they are a "thin blue line," and not mere armed bureaucrats. The myth that cops are in constant danger from the public justifies hair-trigger killings.

Consider the use of "civilian" to describe the public. Police are civilians. The only kind of police officer who isn't a civilian is a military policeman. Places where "civilians" interact with non-civilian law enforcement are, by definition, under military occupation. Calling the public "civilians" is a cheap rhetorical trick that converts a police officer to a patrolling soldier in hostile territory. Calling us "civilians" justifies killing us, because if we're civilians, then they are soldiers and we are at war.

The NYPD clearly conceives of itself as an occupying force and considers its "civilian" oversight to be the enemy. When New York's Civilian Complaint Review Board gained independence in 1993, thousands of off-duty cops joined Rudy Giuliani in a mass protest at City Hall and an occupation of the Brooklyn Bridge. This mass freakout is a measure of police intolerance for oversight – after all, the CCRB isn't even allowed to discipline officers, only make (routinely ignored) recommendations.

Kerry Sweet was the NYPD lawyer who oversaw the department's bodycam rollout. He once joked that the NYPD missed a chance to "bomb the room" where the NYPD's CCRB was meeting (when Propublica asked him to confirm this, he said he couldn't remember those remarks, but "on reflection, it should have been an airstrike").

Obvious defects in the NYPD's bodycam policy go beyond the ability to suppress disclosure of the footage. The department has no official tracking system for its bodycam files. They aren't geotagged, only marked by officer badge-number and name. So if a member of the public comes forward to complain that an unknown officer committed a crime at a specific place and time, there's no way to retrieve that footage. Even where footage can be found, the NYPD often hides the ball: in 20% of cases where the Department told the CCRB footage didn't exist, they were lying.

Figuring out how to make bodycam footage work better is complex, but there are some obvious first steps. Other cities have no problem geotagging their footage. In Chicago, the CCRB can directly access the servers where bodycam footage is stored (when the NYPD CCRB members proposed this, they were fired).

Meanwhile, the NYPD keeps protecting its killers. The Propublica story opens with the police killing of Miguel Richards. Richards' parents hadn't heard from him in a while, so they asked his Bronx landlord to check on him (the Richards live in Jamaica). The landlord called the cops. The cops killed Richards.

The cops claimed he had a gun and they were acting in self-defense. They released a highly edited reel of bodycam footage to support that claim. When the full video was eventually extracted, it revealed that Richards had a tiny plastic toy guy and a small folding knife. The officers involved believed he was suffering an acute mental health incident and stated that policy demanded that they close his bedroom door and wait for specialists. Instead, they barked orders at him and then fired 16 rounds at him. Seven hit him. One ruptured his aorta. As he lay dying on his bedroom floor, one officer roughly tossed him around and cuffed him. He died.

New York's Police Benevolent Association – the largest police "union" in NYC – awarded the officers involved its "Finest of the Finest" prize for their conduct in the killing.

This isn't an isolated incident. A month after the NYPD decided not to punish the cops who killed Richards, NYPD officers murdered Kawaski Trawick in his Bronx apartment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#Kawaski-Trawick

The officers lied about it, suppressed release of the bodycam footage that would reveal their lies, and then escaped any justice when the footage and the lies were revealed.

None of this means that bodycams are useless. It just means that bodycams will only help bring accountability to police forces when they are directed by parties who have the will and power to make the police accountable.

When police leaders and city governments support police corruption, adding bodycams won't change that fact.

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/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Tony Webster, modified https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minneapolis_Police_Officer_Body_Camera_%2848968390892%29.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #impunity #ccrb #nypd #abolish the police #acab #police #corruption #bodycams #body-worn cameras #propublica

[zenosanalytic]

You know how bullshit rent is? Elon Musk hasn't paid rent on Twitter's main offices in, like, 6 months, and has Twitter been evicted? Of course not. Apparently, when you're rich or a company, you can just tell your landlords to fuck off and the gov won't do shit to you.

#zA Writes #Elon Musk #Twitter #Rent #Capitalism #Society #Impunity #zA's Inveterate Politicism #cantankerous posts

[kthulhu42]

So tell me more about how women "manipulate the police and courts" and how "women lie about being abused and get believed and men get put in prison for 20 years over false accusations"

He set her on fire after she begged several police stations for help and nobody took her fears seriously

(Despite him having a history of violence, a history of mental health issues, and a court order telling him to stay away from her and her children, which he ignored, which are all warning signs that SHOULD have been listened to)

Tell me more about how totally innocent men get punished by this "unfair system"

#radblr #radical feminism #Femicide #Violence against women #Men ignore court orders with impunity and women are murdered #The police should be held accountable

[noticieropoblano]

#JusticiaParaEric, era médico pasante de tan solo 24 años de edad; fue ejecutado en Durango

#JusticiaParaEric, era médico pasante de tan solo 24 años de edad; fue ejecutado en Durango

La Fiscalía General del Estado tomó conocimiento del homicidio del médico pasante de 24 años de edad, en un consultorio médico del ejido El Brillante, de Pueblo Nuevo El doctor Eric Andrade Ramírez, pasante del servicio social de Durango fue asesinado la tarde del viernes en el municipio de Pueblo Nuevo, Durango. La Fiscalía General del Estado tomó conocimiento del homicidio del médico pasante…

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#doctor #durango #ericandrade #impune #Justiciaparaeric #Juticia #medico #Pasante

[dicionarioprivado]

Inulto

adjetivo

1. não vingado.

Sinônimos, relações e derivações: impune, injusto, injustiça, impunidade

#i #inulto #impune #injusto #injustiça #impunidade #adjetivo

[emptyjunior]

Unhinged game

#the Cazador thing!!!! let me kick men off platforms with impunity #baldurs gate #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #baldurs gate patch #video games

[moidhaterxxx]

Man I hate how much is required to be safe for women to travel. I have a little trip to go on and there's so much i need to do first like arranging someone to be there, have a companion to go with on the night bus, knowing someone in the other city.

Meanwhile moids just hop on anything and go.

Patriarchy isn't just some scary spectre looming in the distance, it's a real presence that stops our autonomy and freedom

#I fucking hate that I can't travel with impunity #Fuckin hell #radfems please interact #radfem #radical feminists please touch #radical feminism #radical feminist safe #rudefem #indian radfem

[columboscreens]

#columbo #season 5 #identity crisis #love when the killers essentially drop trou and moon columbo with impunity because they know he can't do anything yet #just try to touch me you dumb crumpled mcdonalds bag #cigar measuring contest go

[gwydionmisha]

#Chicago #Police Impunity #Perjury #Police Criminals #News

[huariqueje]

Israel “is very efficient in manipulating propaganda and brainwashing all over the world,” and is “the only occupier in history which presents itself as a victim.” … is the world duty to interfere … the World must force peace on Israel.  - Gideon Levy , israeli journalist .

#Gideon Levy #israeli journalist #Gaza genocide #world duty #israel crimes against humanity #ICJ case #israel acussed of genocide #current events #israel eternal impunity #colonialism #israel aparthei state

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The internet is not a (link)dump truck

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:

https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-081-war-with-mosquitoes

Here in the twilight of capitalism's planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there's more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn't fit into the week's "Hey look at this" linkdumps.

Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am very excited about this. Disoriented, even.

When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It's enough to make one giddy. Plus, the New York Times let me call Amazon "the apex predator of our platform era"! Now that it's in the "paper of record," it's official:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism's imminent demise since The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for "crisis" also translates as "opportunity." Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/30/bedbugs-take-paris.html

But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (Stein's Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.

What's the difference between feudalism and capitalism? According to Yanis Varoufakis, it comes down to whether we value rents (income you get from owning things) over profits (income you get from doing things):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

By that metric, the FTC's case against Amazon is really a case against feudalism. Through predatory pricing and acquisitions, Amazon has turned itself into a chokepoint that every merchant, writer and publisher has to pass through in order to reach their customers. Amazon charges a fortune to traverse that chokepoint (estimates range from 45% to 51% of gross revenues) and then forces sellers to raise their prices everywhere else when they hike their Amazon prices so they can afford Amazon's tolls. It's "an economy-wide hidden tax":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-ftc-sues-to-break-up-amazon-over

Now, feudalism isn't a straightforward proposition. Like, are you sure you mean feudalism? Maybe you mean "manorialism" (they're easy to mix up):

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Plus, much of what we know about the "Dark Ages" comes from grifter doofuses like Voltaire, a man who was capable of dismissing the 800 year Holy Roman Empire with a single quip ("neither holy, roman, nor an empire"). But the reality is a lot more complicated, gnarly and interesting.

That's where medievalist Eleanor Janeaga comes in, and her "Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire" is a banger:

https://going-medieval.com/2023/09/29/against-voltaire-or-the-shortest-possible-introduction-to-the-holy-roman-empire/

Now, while it's true that Enlightenment thinkers gave medieval times a bum rap, it's likewise true that a key element of Enlightenment justice is transparency: justice being done, and being seen to be done. One way to distinguish "modern" justice from "medieval" trials is to ask whether the public is allowed to watch the trial, see the evidence, and understand the conclusion.

Here again, there is evidence that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism and feudalism. The Amazon trial has already been poisoned by farcical redactions, in which every key figure is blacked out of the public record:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

This is part of a trend. The other gigantic antitrust case underway right now, against Google, has turned into a star chamber as well, with Judge Amit P Mehta largely deferring to Google's frequent demands to close the court and seal the exhibits:

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

Google's rationale for this is darkly hilarious: if the public is allowed to know what's happening in its trial, this will be converted into "clickbait," which is to say, "The public is interested in this case, and if they are informed of the evidence against us, that information will be spread widely because it is so interesting":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

Thankfully, this secrecy is struggling to survive the public outrage it prompted. While the court's Zoom feed has been shuttered and while Judge Mehta is still all-too-willing to clear the courtroom during key testimony, at least the DoJ's exhibits aren't being sealed at the same clip as before:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892215/google-search-antitrust-trial-documents-public-again-judge-mehta-rules

In 2023, the world comes at you fast. There's an epic struggle over the future of corporate dominance playing out all around us. I mean, there are French antitrust enforcers kicking down doors of giant tech companies and ransacking their offices for evidence of nefarious anticompetitive plots:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894863/nvidia-offices-raided-french-competition-authority

As ever, the question is "socialism or barbarism." But don't say that too loud: in America, socialism is a slur, one that dates back to the Reconstruction era, when pro-slavery factions called Black voting "socialism in South Carolina."

Ever since, white nationalists used "socialism" make Americans believe that "socialism" was an "extremist" view, so they'd stand by while everyone from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump smeared their opponents as "Marxists":

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4066499-trump-paints-2024-campaign-as-righteous-crusade/

As Heather Cox Richardson puts it for The Atlantic, "There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-socialism-racist-origins/675453/

The cruelty isn't the point, in other words. Cruelty is the tactic. The point is power. Remember, no war but class war. All of this is in service to paying workers less so that bosses and investors can have more.

Take "essential workers," everyone from teachers to zookeepers, nurses to librarians, EMTs to daycare workers. All of these "caring" professions are paid sub-living wages, and all of these workers are told that "they matter too much to earn a living wage":

https://www.okdoomer.io/praise-doesnt-pay/

The "you matter too much to pay" mind-zap is called "vocational awe," a crucial term introduced by Ettarh Fobazi in her 2018 paper:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Vocational awe is how creative workers – like the writers who just won their strike and the actors who are still fighting – are conned into working at starvation wages. As the old joke goes, "What, and give up show-business?"

https://ask.metafilter.com/117904/Whats-the-joke-thas-hase-the-punchline-what-and-give-up-show-business

In this moment of Big Tech-driven, AI-based wage suppression, mass surveillance, corruption and inequality, perhaps we should take a moment to remind ourselves that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Or, more to the point, the warning was about high-tech corporate takeover of our lives, and the suggestion was that we could seize the means of computation (a synonym for William Gibson's "the street finds its own use for things"):

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

We are living in a lopsided cyberpunk future, long on high-tech corporate takeover, short of computation seizing. This point is made sharply in JWZ's "Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City," which is beautifully packaged as a Hypercard stack that you run on an in-browser Mac Plus emulator from the Internet Archive:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/neuroblast-dispatch-from-the-cyberpunk-city/

Cast your gaze ahead, to the near future: Public space has all but disappeared. Corporate landlords use AI-powered robots to harass the homeless. The robots, built slick and white with an R2-D2 friendliness now most resemble giant butt plugs covered in graffiti and grime.

Science fiction doesn't have to be a warning. It can also be a wellspring of hope. That's what I tried to do with The Lost Cause, my forthcoming Green New Deal novel, which Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Writing a hopeful novel of ecological, social and economic redemption, driven by solidarity, repair, and library socialism, was a powerful tonic against despair in this smoke-smothered, flooded, mosquito-bitten time. And while the book isn't out yet, there are early indications I succeeded, like Kim Stanley Robinson's reaction, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this."

And now, we have a concurring judgment from The Library Journal, who yesterday published their review, which concludes: "a thought-provoking story, with a message of hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak":

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-lost-cause-2196385

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/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

#pluralistic #antitrust #amazon #opacity #impunity #vocational awe #cyberpunk #dystopia watch #hypercard #jwz #holy roman empire #voltaire #enlightenment #dark ages #history #eleanor janega #linkdump #linkdumps #the lost cause #science fiction #books

[chamomileteainabuttercup]

I've got a half-formed idea I can't quite squish into shape where Corroded Coffin finally has an opportunity to play where someone with useful influence - a talent scout, a music journalist - will hear them. Maybe it's a Battle of the Bands or something like that. They're keen as mustard but very, very nervous. Steve has come along to help them move their equipment and set up on stage and Eddie takes him to one side.

"Stevie," he says, pressing his hands together prayer-like, "I'm going to ask you to do something a little bit unethical."

"What, like sabotage the other bands' equipment?"

"God no. I said a little bit. You see that chick with the red hair in the white leather jacket talking to the organiser? Her opinion matters. Like, a lot. So what I want you to do is, when we're playing, you get close to her and turn on the charm."

"Am I trying to distract her?" Steve asks, looking puzzled.

"No! No, you're just going to be this big cute guy who gives her some flattering attention. That way, she remembers while Coffin was playing, she was having a good time. It's subtle, see? Psychological. You get it, right?"

"Obviously I get it," Steve says, "but what if she really wants to hear you and I'm just annoying?"

"Why would she think you're annoying?" Eddie asks, honestly baffled. "What girl would not be excited to have you paying attention to her?"

"A lesbian," Steve says immediately.

"Okay, but -"

"A happily taken one."

"Sure, but -"

"A professional who wants to concentrate on the performance and form an unbiased opinion."

"You're killing me, Stevie."

"Not to mention, you're asking me to focus on someone else when you're playing? Be realistic. I have my work cut out not to throw my underwear on the stage," Steve says, smiling.

(Here my idea kind of fizzles out. I don't know whether Eddie's encouraged by this or just exasperated that his boyfriend is no good as a henchman.)

#steddie #all my ideas about battles of the bands in the 80s are heavily filtered through Jem and the Holograms #the Misfits would absolutely sabotage the other bands' equipment #remember the time they stole the Holograms' instruments and drove off with them in their van #and then when the Holograms chased them in a car threw the instruments out the back of the van at them? #I absolutely love how much theft assault and general mayhem the Misfits perpetrate WITH TOTAL IMPUNITY #occasionally Stormer will have an attack of conscience #or Eric will realise someone's actually going to get maimed or killed and react with Utter Horror #as if the bomb wasn't planted on his orders!

[zeemczed-blog]

Y'know what's funny to me?

The fact that the UK Parliament has decided to pick a fight with the country that's motto is LITERALLY "don't fuck with me."

Okay, technically it's "Nemo me impune lacessit" - No man provokes me with impunity - but there's a damn good reason that it's usually just rendered WHO DUAR MEDDLE WIT' ME?!

We are exiting the FA state. We are entering the FO stage.

#Scottish politics #Scottish independence #Pro-independence #Nemo me impune lacessit

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

#impunity #palestine #israel #gaza #free palestine #israeli occupation