#new yorkers don't fact check this

[shamelessequilibria]

Lunch break rant: journalism

Maybe this is where I inadvertently reveal myself to be a shit lord, but one of the podcasts I regularly listen to covers media and journalism. They ran a piece last week from The New Yorker that was an interview with the editor of the New York Times. And just. I felt disgusted after listening to it.

The interview, essentially, was about how the NYT drastically turned around their readership. They were allegedly on the verge of bankruptcy but changed course to become the significant enterprise they are today. The editor took a pretty hardline neoliberal stance on journalism that made me grimace. Primarily, it was the focus on reporting news as straight facts without taking a stance on the matter. He went so far as to claim fair treatment to all political sides and refused to state his own affiliations, despite implying the NYC location would skew a certain way. He even proudly stated they recently added an evangelical Christian to their staff.

Like.

That's such an awful stance to take, but especially for journalists. Is it not duty of journalism to inform responsibly? If you try to treat all sides equally and straddle the line, regardless of how true what you are reporting is, then you are giving equal weight to opposing statements. This is how circumstances like the 2016 US election came to be. Treating opposing parties as moral and factual equals is a disservice to all of your listeners. You give credibility to outlandish positions by even presenting them as a valid. Current political climates demand outrage as buy-in. We get pundits and politicians who engage their firehouse of bullshit because it's impossible to fact check everything, and as long as a shred of truth is present, the media will offer a podium.

The NYT editor danced around this, but hit hard on the need for funding. The quiet part, here, is that they are the same thing. The NYT charges a paywall to access their content, further limiting accessibility to news. The paywall acts as an enhancement to their credibility; this is premium journalism that you must pay for, it must be true. And then they provide the most asinine centrist takes possible to not piss off those who are willing to shell out for a news website.

I don't know what the solution is and I won't pretend to. I wish I lived in a world where people saw journalism as a noble profession of service to civilization. But more and more lately the above tactics leave people annoyed and disillusioned with journalists. They see skeevy slime balls looking to incite outrage for profit, ignoring the slow shift these pundits take from journalist to "entertainer." I yearn for solid reporting like a sort of golden age, Upton Sinclair or Bob Woodward. Those who bring to light massive stories for the good of people and not their own bottom line.

Why is that gone? Why do people not care? How can true journalism exist in a society so capitalistic that the drive to remain "independent" means to sell out your own morals? Government intervention is just as dangerous as to this profession as the free market is, so what is the answer?

#shameless rants #journalism #politics

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

to be clear, i think that "new york city was less than 97% white in 1920" is a pretty easy and on its own harmless mistake to make. i don't think anyone is dumb for kneejerk assuming that new york city was less than 97% white in 1920. almost everything commonly associated with new york city that has happened since 1920 has some kind of connection to non-white groups, much of it specifically to black new yorkers. also 97 is a truly overwhelming percentage! if you had asked me to guess how white NYC was in 1920 i probably would have been way off. but like that's the kind of thing that keeps me humble and mostly prevents me from publicly posting about what a ridiculous idiot someone is for presenting an alleged fact that contradicts my previously held assumptions without bothering to fact-check either their fact or my assumptions myself. being wrong is totally fine! just cultivate your guard against smugness so that you don't wind up being smugly wrong. because if you allow yourself to fall into smugness habitually i promise you WILL at some point wind up there, because everyone is wrong all the time, and in an ideal world that would just mean we are all constantly able to learn!

[moonbeam-fox]

The single most frustrating thing to me as someone who has been doing wellness checks, resource distribution, and other forms of homeless advocacy in some permutation or another since I was a homeless teenager is that people act like the issue of unhoused individuals is really complicated. It's not. The solution is titled in the problem.

But Jack!

I hear you say. First of all don't take that tone with me.

We can't just give people houses, they don't know how to manage them!

Great point! So we'll need to give them case management check ins a few times a week to help them adjust to living off the street.

But what about people who can't maintain housing because of addiction and mental illness?

How astute of you. We will also need to offer robust substance use care including needle exchanges, supervised use sites, and expanded behavioral and mental health care.

Okay okay okay. But what about...

Listen kid. We can do this all day. Transitional housing like tiny home camps to help people who aren't ready to be housed. Resource kits and wilderness survival training for people who want to live off in the woods somewhere by themselves. Engaged, passionate, trauma-informed care for all social workers. Robust screenings for cops (or...hear me out...police and prison abolition replaced with an evidence based approach to getting people the help and resources they need...since many crimes are...based on poor care or lack of resources in some way).

Its really not that complicated. It's hard, and we have to convince business in resource dense city cores that yeah maybe potentially there's a chance their property values will go down, but most likely they will improve because there are less incidents in the area.

We know, we KNOW, that housing people is cheaper and easier and less of a strain on local economies than leaving them unhoused. (Million Dollar Murray, Malcolm Gladwell, new yorker, 2006) It's a demonstrable fact. There is no excuse.

Unless of course, it was never about unhoused people at all, but a warning to punish vulnerable people as a means of showing middle and working class folks what happens when they slip off the edge or refuse to play along with capitalisms terrorist demands...but that couldn't be it right. Couldn't be that.

#every week or so i have one of these convos and someone is like oh you should run for city council or mayor #bless the people that say that and bless those that serve in that capacity but #they know what the answers are they've always known #aid programs have always been gentrified and skewed toward uplifting white people and those deemed respectable outliers of whiteness #its not broken it works exactly as intended #thanks for reading i just needed to vent that today

[unforth]

happy belated birthday!!! 🥳

also i just now read your bio and saw you live in new york — a friend of mine and i left a little voucher for ��a fellow pro ship author” in a queer bookstore there and it somehow pleases me to actually know a pro ship author who lives in new york. yay 💝

ah, thank you!!

And high-five geeky cool New Yorkers! Which queer bookstore?? I'm actually upstate (I live near Albany) but I'm from New York City, and my mom and brother still live there so we visit pretty often (I was just there this past weekend, in fact). I'd love to have more cool bookstores to check out...

(and yeah, I don't tend to make a big deal of the "pro-ship" label just cause I think it's kinda a silly label? But I absolutely agree with all pro-ship positions. Anti-censorship has been a core tenant of my personal beliefs for 20 years, and I ain't about to change that because some folks think some fictional characters shouldn't fuck, even if they're not fictional characters I personally want to see fuck.)

#unforth replies

[westernparadise]

Living in Taiwan is not easy - now, before I jump into a melodramatic account of how I feel about my life, please do not see me as an egotistical narcissist. The following is very much just an honest truth.

Basically - sometimes I do like bragging about having worked at AMC, and how my ex-manager said that I had the best English out of all the Taiwanese teachers, and that my linguistic abilities were somewhat better than most of the foreign teachers as well. That being said, I do think that my English is no where up to par - and I best study every day to hone it and make it better.

My predicament really comes from the fact that the competition in Taiwan is bleak. I'm not judging Taiwan - I wouldn't live anywhere else, honestly. I love Taiwan and how it's such a Buddhist community. But after hours of jotting down foreign vocabularies and checking their definitions - I get thrown into an existential frenzy - questioning why I'm even doing so, and if anyone's English is even THAT good, to begin with. "What if I'm just learning English in vain?" would be one of my usual brain farts. I also think about how people are dumbing down and the fact that no one probably even uses these vocabularies anymore. I often tend to forget about the fact that Taiwan is not an English-speaking community and that people whose native language is English actually use the language to feel, argue, complain, praise, and just generally communicate. They LIVE the language. They FEEL with the language. There are LOTS OF nuances with the language, and I forget how I DON'T have an American or UK college degree, and that native speakers are able to use English on a daily basis. I forget how American kids spent millions of dollars on Ivy League schools and are able to work at big shot companies doing lots of important and professional things. I forget how writers are able to pop out insanely insightful books, and news anchors and writers and even songwriters are able to use English in such a meticulously beautiful way to communicate with their audience.

I just forget, you know. Because 365 days out of a year I don't get to have IRL conversations with a human being in English. It's usually textual, on cam, or just during class teaching the alphabet or phonetics. I have an existential crisis every day, and I don't know what to do. The government's plan of making Taiwan a bilingual "country" by 2030 really just isn't happening (not even close...it's laughable I'm sorry, they're not doing jack squat.) Part of being a Buddhist, and also being a human is finding satisfaction and contentment in our immediate environment, making the best out of a good/bad situation. Just having shelter and food is such a luxury, especially in a modern world where natural/manmade disasters are so rampant. There is political unease and a global economic downturn, not to mention wars are galore. Lastly, I don't think my English is anywhere near as good as I would like it to be anyway. Gotta keep striving. I want my English to be so good that I can open any fiction novel and be able to understand 95% of the intricate vocabs. I want to be able to read or even be so good that I can WRITE like the New Yorker writers. I want to be so good that I can watch CNN or BBC and understand literally everything. There is a thirst in me for English. I don't know why I love it so much. It's almost like an artistic expression for my soul.

[princesskuragina]

books set in new york city be like i was between 10th and the village but i needed to go north to 75th and obviously i had to avoid the east side so that i didn’t run into 5th but my apartment was on 12th and The Bridge. these are geographic references we all understand.

#if literally any other city did that it'd be caught in edits as extraneous information #and confusing #but nyc is just nyc bro #new yorkers don't fact check this #bookblr #books #a little life #lit #english lit

[citylightsbooks]

The Motor of the Essay: Rachel Kushner in Conversation

This is an excerpt of a free event we held in conjunction with Litquake for our virtual events series, City Lights LIVE. This event features Rachel Kushner in conversation with Dana Spiotta celebrating the launch of The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, published by Scribner. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by our events coordinator Peter Maravelis. You can listen to the entire event on our podcast. You can watch it in full as well on our Youtube channel.

*****

Dana Spiotta: I know that everyone's going to ask you these questions about writing fiction versus nonfiction. And I read somewhere that you said, with your novels, you begin with imagery more than an idea or a character. With the nonfiction, there is a range of pieces about writers and specific books to journalism--like the prison story and Palestine--and then there’s the ones that are personal essays, right, like the girl in a motorcycle. So I guess they might all have different origins. But where do you begin with that? And how is that different as a process from what you write in fiction?

Rachel Kushner: Yeah, so it is kind of a different process for me, although I sometimes feel guilty to try to make declarations about which is harder, or how one does one thing, because you know, for some people, the essay is what literature is.

For me, fiction is more difficult. And so in a certain way it's what I've signed on to do with my life, because the process can be so mysterious and fickle and unreliable. And I'm waiting to catch a wave, or get the drift and then try to figure out how to sustain it, and then how to change it in order to sustain it. Managing so many different things at once is a very curious hermeneutic, because you need to know where you're going.

But then you also need to let happenstance inform you. I think some of the ways that we are challenged, and how we learn in our lives and also as writers, are by having encounters that we did not anticipate or predict, and that happens in fiction. And then you're kind of in a "taking mode" and you know exactly what's for you and you go with it and you run.

Essays are a little different for me. I mean, obviously. Time is shorter. But usually the motor of the essay is a sprung sentence. I come up with one sentence that is doing something in the syntax and it's making something sort of declarative. And it's kind of a gambit. And it needs to be followed by another. And sometimes I'll have a whole paragraph like that. And those paragraphs will just be floating in the void of the potentiality of the essay that I haven't written yet. And I don't sweat, like, "How am I going to link this to that?" yet. Because I just know by instinct that they're both going in. And if I put them in the essay, then they are interrelated by virtue merely of their proximity to each other. Then I start to build links.

Some journalism is a very different process. Like you mentioned, for the piece that I wrote, originally for the New York Times Magazine, about prison abolition and the carceral geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, they said it can be any length and made it long. So you know, it was like 20,000 words. And it was my version of that essay, and it probably was a pretty good essay. But I think the weakness in it was that I was not speaking to their audience. And they really--you have written for the New York Times Magazine--they want to be able to countenance everything you say, sentence by sentence. It's not like writing an op-ed, where you just say your thing and then people can fight it out in the comments. They want to be fully on board. And I wouldn't want to have to do that all the time.

It's extremely difficult, because you have to keep remembering how to bring in somebody who may have wildly different ideas about how society should be organized, and not seem polemical, not seem pushy. It's a kind of seduction I think that really benefits from collaboration with an editor. It's arduous, it takes time. That essay took two years to write, but because the subject matter was important to me, ultimately, I decided it was worth it.

Dana Spiotta: Yeah, it's such a great essay. And I learned so much from it.

Peter Maravelis: When you're writing about events and feelings from decades ago, how do you return to the experience? What takes you back?

Rachel Kushner: That's a really great question. So, you know, with some of these essays, like the first essay in the book called “Girl on a Motorcycle,” which is about the Cabo 1000--a no longer existent, illegal motorcycle road race where you span the Baja in the course of a day--was the first thing that I ever published and I wrote it 20 years ago. And after looking back over it, in order to put it in this book and to improve upon it, I opened it up; I wrote a new beginning and a new ending. There are so many details and scenes in that essay that I never, ever would have remembered had I not written them down when I was much closer to the meat of that experience.

But there are other essays like the title essay which I just wrote quite recently. I'd put the book together, and I knew it was going to be called “The Hard Crowd.” And then I just basically sat down and wrote this essay. And I think, you know, as maybe you're telling a story, or going through your life, sometimes things really do sort of trigger the release of a memory. And Proust has this conception of two different kinds of memory that he calls voluntary memory and involuntary memory. And voluntary memory is the kind of fixed story that you tell, you know, "Oh, he's telling that story again," meaning it's a kind of sclerotic, hardened account that, for Proust, doesn't really have any real artistic or intrinsic wealth to it. Whereas involuntary memory is maybe when you would smell a perfume that you haven't smelled in 30 years and it reminds you of this or that. And I think that writing itself can activate involuntary memory, because you start to see into spaces you haven't seen in a really long time.

Like when I was writing this essay, I somehow ended up talking about Terence McKenna, and remembered that I'd seen Terence McKenna give this lecture at the Palace of Fine Arts. And then I saw the Palace of Fine Arts and him on the stage and where I was sitting, and who was in the audience. And so then I mentioned in the essay that this noise musician who I don't know, but I knew who he was, was sitting right in front of me. And that was a funny thing because the New Yorker called him and asked, "Were you at a Terence McKenna lecture in 1991." “Yeah, I was.” I mean he probably thought like the FBI is after him or something. I can start to see things and details in pretty haunting detail, particularity once I'm starting to build the framework that will allow those kind of involuntary memories to come up to present themselves.

Peter Maravelis: Do you feel that maybe kids who grew up in a certain era share communal memories, like growing up in San Francisco in the 70s is full of shared moments and scenes?

Rachel Kushner: Yes, I do feel that, but I would maybe even particularize it to not just an era, but to kids who grew up in a certain world within San Francisco. And I'm going to just be blunt: it's the kids who went to public school in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. We all traversed a world together, and the particularity of that world. I'm not saying that it's special or different. Everybody has a world that they traversed, and that stays inside of them as memory. And ours is ours. And those who experienced it do feel bonded, I think, for life, in a way. And it's something I've thought about a lot since that essay was published in the New Yorker because of the number of people who reached out to me and wanted to talk about their own memories of this same world that we shared.

Peter Maravelis: In the New York Times review, Dwight Garner mentioned the phrase: “At the party, she was kindness in the hard crowd," from the Cream song "White Room." Is that in fact where your title came from?

Rachel Kushner: It is. I mentioned that in the title essay, it all becomes clear, or at least somewhat clear where I heard that song, and why I made it the title of this book. It's a good line.

To see upcoming events at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, check out our complete calendar.

#Rachel Kushner #Dana Spiotta #City Lights Books #City Lights Publishers #City Lights Podcast #LIVE! From City Lights #The Hard Crowd #Youtube

[digitaldandelions]

Why you can't talk about the Gentry on Facebook.

"Why should I care?"

You are concerned about Gentrification and its effects on marginalized peoples.

You want a strategy on gaming gentrification to benefit your neighbors.

Let's get started.

Facebook helps me keep track of my Digital Village

I have a lot of friends on Facebook from different walks of life. Mainly composed of--

Family, friends-of-family, and former classmates who have been working for the community for years to decades (keep pressing forward, fam!)

Friends I made while studying at North Carolina A&T State University (AGGIE PRIDE!!)

Friends I've made while abroad at Korea University (SHOUTS OUT TO Y'ALL!)

Community members I've found while working in every borough in NYC (MARLS, BlaQue, and various kinhood spirits!)

All of my people are really active in the community in some way, shape, or form. My Digital Village has various insights that make my Facebook timeline an engaging and enlightening place. I am very thankful for this and appreciative of the people who make up my village.

However, many in my village have been banned or barred because Facebook is not a free place to communicate. As many Facebook users will confirm, this platform bans any mention of White people, especially White men.

Go ahead! Try it for yourself. Facebook will take down your post because it violates Facebook's Community Terms of Service (ToS). It doesn't matter who you are. --To quote one of my favorite people, "I am White people!"

Facebook is a Private Company: They can do whatever they Want.

Investigating the legalese Facebook uses to protect White People's right to never be mentioned on Facebook would be fascinating. However, it's irrelevant. Facebook is a private company, and they can do whatever they want. More importantly, trying to challenge Facebook could potentially give them more power than we intend. We don't need Facebook to establish itself any more than it is now.

Therefore, our collective solution to this problem is to use coded language to foul up Facebook's "Community ToS" AI. My village has taken to using terms like "🌾," "⚪," or "the Gentry." It's a colorful and fun way to express ourselves on a very wide platform. This works for now.

Once you get tired of using coded language, moving to other platforms deflates Facebook's power.

Even more importantly, Facebook's ToS caused me to use other platforms that support my community. Pointedly, I use platforms like Tumblr and Discord, which are committed to supporting people in my Digital Village. This is how you game a "free capitalistic market" for now. Remember: MySpace only became irrelevant because we all moved onto other platforms.

Who exactly is the Gentry?

"The Gentry" is a cute term I personally use on Facebook to refer to White people. However, it's a term I use facetiously. For a modern, American, definition: the Gentry can refer to anyone who moves into a gentrified neighborhood, thus causing Gentrification.

"Gentrifiers" can be affluent, thrifty, White people taking advantage of the cheaper property values in a marginalized neighborhood. However, anyone can be affluent and thrifty in this economy: Asian Americans, Black people, anyone. I have even qualified as a Gentrifier in a lot of cases! I'm a country girl transplant to NYC. I lived in Seoul, South Korea, for a year. What matters is that the person moving is from outside the community.

When these new people move in, the gentrifying process looks like this:

The gentrifiers bring with them a demand for expensive products and services that the locals can't afford.

This demand irreparably changes the neighborhood to meet those needs.

The increased value of the neighborhood prices out the Locals-- e.g., through increased rent, taxes, etc

Local families and businesses are forced to move out because of the increased rent AND cultural displacement. i.e., The gentrifiers complain about the locals' habits because they perceive them as incompatible with their lifestyle.

What causes Gentrification?

I have lived and worked in nearly every borough of New York City. I also grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina-- where one side of the city has always owned the other side of the city. Subsequently, I have also lived on either side of Winston-Salem as well-- the more affluent West-side and the "Ghetto" East-side.

Can you guess which side of Winston-Salem owns the other?

The primary aspect of Gentrification is that the locals do not own the land that they live on. The East-side of Winston-Salem was primarily Downtown and apartment complexes where poor families rent their homes. That meant a lot of things, particularly that it was difficult for the poor families to have control over where they lived.

Property improvement was up to whoever owned their home on the West-side. Since the owners did not live in the neighborhood, they actually didn't care about upkeep. They only care about extracting money from their renters.

If you can recall your Social Studies class: this is a similar configuration for imperialistic powers and their colonies. Imperial governments didn't care about the people in the colonies and their quality of life. They only cared about extracting the wealth out of the colonies. The sole purpose of the colony is to enrich its imperial counterpart, facetiously called the "Mother country." In addition to being patronizing, this configuration left the colonists had no control over their own country. The lack of self-governance systems is why we see formally colonized countries still struggling to compete. In some cases, the country is in tatters hundreds of years after their imperial overseers have left.

Gentrification and Colonization has a lot of the same Economic Patterns

Again, similar to colonization, gentrification ensures that there is very little opportunity for self-governance. Locals do not have the economic resources to improve where they live or dictate the sort of business services are available for the locals. For example, we always had to go to the West-side of Winston-Salem for banking services. The only thing available on the East-side were predatory pay-day loan parlors and expensive Western Union transfer points.

Gentrification reduces economic opportunity for locals, but what about political representation? In Colonization, local representation was virtually non-existent: the Imperialitisc power would install governors to keep the colony in check. Does Gentrification share this pattern too?

Gerrymandering: Gentrified Neighborhoods Literally Dwell on the Margins

Back to Winston-Salem: for families on the Eastside, the only control they had was electing people to represent them Locally, at the State level, or at the Federal level. However, Gerrymandering made this impossible in a lot of cases at the Federal level. Gerrymandering ensures that marginalized neighborhoods have a splintered vote. Having a district border run through your neighborhood means no one from that neighborhood will ever represent you. It's impossible to petition the person who does represent you because they will always see you as a minority, at best. This is literally where the term "marginalization" comes from.

The result is that the locals are barred from resources to improve and profit from the land that they live on. Once developers and actual landowners want to take advantage of the devalued land, the locals are priced out. Their target market is the Gentry: this is why their preferences and services are prioritized.

As predicted, 20 years later, since I've lived in Winston-Salem, most of these families have been priced out of East Winston by Gentrification. I see many realtor websites that describe my old neighborhood as "up and coming," with glitzy pictures of cafés and bars. None of these businesses were there when I was growing up. You see this same process in NYC.

New York City has a very similar problem as Winston-Salem, NC, exasperated by the fact that there is a larger culture of renting. One of my Digital Village members' attempts to purchase a house was curtailed by companies who could quickly snatch up the property. -Even when she was trying to purchase in the outer boroughs of NYC (Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx)!

Most small-scale LandLords are old New Yorkers who owned the property before the 2000s. Either the owners had property before the Real Estate boom or inherited their property and decided to keep it for rental income. Even my little Landlady. She is an old New Yorker who moved out to Throggs Neck but kept her old house in Jamaica to rent out to families and reliable, young professionals.

How much property the Locals own where they live and work determines how the neighborhood will change.

What can I do about Gentrification?

Remember: Gentrification is determined by what realtors think that the Gentry wants. There is a lot for both (1) locals and (2) their new neighbors to lessen the effects of Gentrification.

If you are moving into an "up and coming neighborhood":

Learn about who has been there and what their culture is. As someone who would classify as a Gentrifier in many cases, I had a much more colorful experience by learning about the culture I'm entering. My Digital Village is so expansive because I took the time to learn about others. Not only will you reduce the chances for Cultural Displacement, but you'll also live a more enriching life! There are many things the neighborhood has to offer, many that may be outside your comfort zone. I promise, taking a chance on what your local neighbors have to offer will change your life for the better.

Support Local Businesses that are run by the Locals. As a gentrifier, my first step in moving to Jamaica, Queens, was finding a solid burrito spot! Shout out to Bella's!

Think of other creative ways you can support the community. Join a local Community Association. Ask about what their needs are. After doing your research, you always need to ask your neighbors what they need. They will tell you.

If you are a Local in an "up and coming neighborhood," look into obtaining a piece of the neighborhood through collective investing! Beyond purchasing land yourself, collective investing the fastest way to set down your stob. Getting your piece can be done in a few ways, including:

Asking your Landlord if they are interested in converting your housing into a Housing Cooperative. Essentially, you get shares of the house you live in. This is beneficial to your Landlord because they can get many tax benefits, depending on where you are. It benefits you, especially if you are a good tenant. You can get dividends from the profit every year, making your place of living more stable.

Look into investing in another Local Landlord. If your Landlord isn't willing, find another whose opened to receiving investments. Some of them need to make ends meet. You can invest as little as $1,000 a year and get dividends from your investment.

Look into investing in a Local Small Business. You can even diversify your investments by looking at local businesses to invest in! Your investments will help your favorite business get more resources to serve your new neighbors coming in. The money you get back will also help make you and your favorite business more solvent. At the very least, increasing the business you do with them will significantly help.

How do I start Investing in Small Businesses?

Let's say you are a local looking to invest in your local business. You could also be the Gentry, who has some disposable income to invest in your Community Association's local investment campaign. In either case, you must start with an Investment Agreement! Investment Agreements are written up by Business Lawyers. They state how much you invest in the business and how much dividends of profit you get back. Either the investor (a community member) or the investee (the small business owner) can draw up an agreement.

To learn more, feel free to book an appointment with me! We'll help match you to the resources you need to get started for free:

https://www.digitaldandelions.com/contact-us

#gentrification #gentrifier #small business #small business solutions #legal assistance #investing #facebook #tumblr #discord #community solutions

[greatheckinblog-blog]

Strong independent woman who don't need no man

I made fatal NYC mistake today that I truly believe all new comers to New York made at one point or another when first moving here; and if you say you haven’t then you’re either an NYC lifer or a fucking liar.

Since I am still off of work and still haven’t found myself a hobby that keeps be from going certifiably insane, I was happy to find myself with small meaningless things to do today. One of the things I have always loved to do was go grocery shopping, even when I was a little kid I loved going with my mom and riding around in the cart and especially smelling the bread isle. That smell can’t be fucking beat. So today I found myself was a decent sized grocery list because we hadn’t gone all week. Now my grocery store is roughly about 4 blocks away from my apt which I always underestimate to be 2 because well I don’t know why. There is a Bravo literally a block away from my apt but the overwhelming cat stink really ruins my shopping experience so I chose to be snooty and shop elsewhere. Well that really fucked me today because as I was strolling through the isles enjoying myself I failed to remember how far I was from home and the fact that I was alone so carrying the bags home wouldn’t be split between two people. This is an NYC no no. I ended up having about 9 bags to carry by myself and two had 6 packs of beer in them. I swear I graduated with honors from both high school and college but this was beyond my intelligence it seems. I ended up having to throw away my iced caramel coffee from Dunkin because I thought it would be a great idea to have my coffee while shopping and it was.. until it wasn’t anymore.

Side note: why is it that everyone at Dunkin feels the need to tell me that the caramel is already sweet enough and I don’t need to add sweetener? Like bitch step off and don’t you ever tell me how I take my coffee. That ain’t your job. I’m a life time coffee drinker. I think I’d know.

Any who, I’m trying to hustle down the street with these heavy ass bags but it is not for the faint of heart. I couldn’t tough it out, I had to stop on corners to catch my breath and to give my poor arms a break. I got looks from all the New Yorkers who knew the situation I was in but they had to let me have my struggle. I finally made it to my building sweat dripping down my face and all. I got all my groceries into my apt and started to assess the damages from smacking bags into sides buildings and having to drop them onto the sidewalk out of exhaustion. I was terrified to look at the beers and two cartons of eggs I had bought (my boyfriend eats eggs like it’s the last eggs on planet earth plus they were on sale 2 for 5, can’t pass up savings like that). I first checked the beers because let’s be honest, those are the most important thing. I was in the clear, thank the lord above and all that is good and holy. Then the eggs were last; NOT ONE SINGLE EGG HAD EVEN THE SLIGHTEST CRACK IN IT. With this being said, today is the day I knew that I was truly a strong independent woman who don’t need no man (even I love you boo, please don’t ever leave me). BUT I will never make that grocery mishap ever again.. Does this experience qualify me as a true New Yorker now..? Yeah no, I didn’t think so.

#independentwomenwhocarrygroceries #beers #truenewyorker #nycprobs

Happy heckin blogging pals.

[thenoticeblog]

Don't Be Fooled: Evidence Suggests Quotas Are a Fact of Life Within the NYPD

by Robert Gangi In what could fairly be described as the de Blasio administration's entry in the contest for the Sean Spicer medal for the the most blatant lie by a government spokesperson this month, here's a recent statement by J. Peter Donald, an NYPD mouthpiece: "Quotas for arrests, summonses, or stops have never been used by the NYPD. The department measures success based on the prevention and reduction of crime." Mr. Donald spoke in reference to a $75 million court settlement that NYC had just agreed to and that accused the Police Department of issuing at least 900,000 bogus summonses from 2007 to 2015. The lawsuit stated that city officials pressure officers on the ground to issue summonses not in response to infractions or crimes but to meet a minimum required number. In general, informed observers of NYPD practices know that the department has employed quotas to evaluate officer performance for years, if not decades. Police brass including recently retired commissioner Bill Bratton and current department head Joseph O'Neil regularly deny their existence partly because state legislation outlaws their use. Police officials euphemistically claim that they have "productivity goals," but not numerical quotas. George Orwell is alive and well at today's NYPD. There are specific reasons that we at the Police Reform Organizing Project are certain about the department's persistent use of quotas. Over the years our organization's representatives have talked with a number of police officers, retired and on the force, all of whom have stated unequivocally that quotas are a daily fact of life within the NYPD. Here are some of their accounts:

 Under pressure to "make their numbers" each month, some officers working in a precinct with a cemetery within its borders will issue "cemetery summonses," meaning that they will enter the graveyard and write up summonses with the names of dead people that they find on the tombstones.  

One of the first questions that an officer new to an inner-city precinct asks is, "What is the number?" Some precincts -- those serving white well-to-do communities, for example -- have no quotas.  

Some officers will for most of the month ignore a neighborhood "hot spot," a place where crime such as drug-dealing or prostitution takes place in the open, and if they have not met their quota, will round up the people at those sites at the end of the month.   

An NYPD supervisor brought rookie officers assigned to transit duty into a room on a subway platform in an inner-city area and directed them to peek through slits in the metal door to look out for and to arrest fare evaders. One officer thinks, "What are you kidding me?' and then they do it again.   

An officer objected to an NYPD higher official about the practice of hiding in a room or behind a post on a subway platform. The officer wants to stand in a visible place by the turnstile -- in this way, his presence will effectively deter fare evaders and he will be available to help New Yorkers if a real problem arises. "No," he's told, "we want you in the room and to hit your number."  

An officer asked his supervisor for an unplanned day off to deal with a family emergency. "Like to help you out," the supervisor replied, "but I have to check your activity." In other words, if the officer did not fulfill his quota, his supervisor would not grant his request.   

To illustrate how quotas turn the idea of good policing on its head, an officer explained: "If I break up a fight between two boys and send them home, I get no credit. If I happen to help deliver a baby in an emergency, I don't get credit. But I score points if I issue a seat belt ticket or record a stop."  

An officer said that sometimes you can see the trail for "quality of life" directives, pressure from headquarters to borough commanders, precinct captains to lieutenants, and sergeants to cops on the street.  

"It is easier to arrest a black or brown kid" in Harlem, an officer told us. He went on to say that under nor circumstances would he arrest an Orthodox Jewish person because they will "make your life miserable" by using their connections against you. 

More evidence has come from the victims of unfair policing who tell us that an officer apologized after making an arrest or issuing a summons. In one instance, an officer, after ticketing a man for walking between the subway cars of a stopped train, said, "Sorry about this, but it's the 26th of the month and I have to make my number."

An especially pernicious feature of the NYPD's quota system is that the officer gets the notch on her/his belt as soon as s/he makes the arrest or issues a summons, the quality of the sanction notwithstanding. If the arrest or summons lacks merit or is straight-up bogus, if the district attorney declines to prosecute -- which happens in roughly 10 percent of NYPD arrests -- or the judge dismisses the charges, the officer not only does not face any consequences, the department rewards the officer by crediting her/him with having taken a step toward "making their number." By applying quotas in this blind and mechanical way, the NYPD actually incentivizes unjust and abusive policing.

As a matter of principle, lying about government practices is bad business. In this era of Trumpian antics we all too frequently see its toxic effect on our public consciousness. We also see how it can conceal the harmful effects that actual on the ground policies have on citizens, especially the most vulnerable people living among us. Mayor de Blasio and Police Chief O'Neill -- after all, Mr. Donald couldn't have issued such a brazen falsehood without their green light -- should take pains not to add another "alternative fact" to our political discussions. While they may think that the circle the wagons tactics represented by Mr. Donald's misguided quote serve NYPD institutional interests, such stratagems serve poorly all us New Yorkers in need of our local government's safeguards and represent a disheartening failure of responsibility at a time when we as a City and country more than ever need to hear the outspoken voices of credible and truthful leaders who directly challenge the corruption of America's political discourse.

Robert Gangi is a police reform activist in NYC. Checkout more of his work here.

#robert gangi #nypd #U.S. Justice System #Law enforcement #broken windows