[Plura-list] Dems can and MUST fight police violence; Save Uncle Hugo's; Ella Jones is Ferguson's new mayor

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Dems can and MUST fight police violence: The only thing necessary for
the triumph of evil...

* Save Uncle Hugo's: Crowdfunding for Minneapolis's beloved, torched
science fiction bookstore.

* Ella Jones is Ferguson's new mayor: The city's first Black mayor.

* Why protests become violent: Cops keep mashing the "be violent" button.

* PPE vs riot gear: Revealed preference, revealed.

* Zoom wants to help the FBI spy on you: Encryption is a luxury good.

* Trivial-to-spoof UK contact tracing: A gift to identity thieves and
fraudsters.

* AT&T; will punish Disney+ viewers: Can you hear me now?

* K-pop fandom pivots to human rights hacktivism: Flooding the zone with
fancams.

* This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🙅🏿‍♂️ Dems can and MUST fight police violence

Under the direction of the 45th President of the USA, American police
forces are engaged in a violent suppression of American people, pursuing
what can only be called a white nationalist pogrom.

The official opposition, in the form of the Democratic Party and its
elected members, are effectively sitting on their hands as the rule of
law is dissolved into a slurry of baton-charges and indiscriminate use
of anti-personnel weaponry.

There's no excuse for this inaction. As David Sirota writes, there are
ten meaningful actions the Dems could take RIGHT NOW that would yield
concrete, significant results, RIGHT NOW, for the people facing
out-of-control, armed "peace officers."

https://sirota.substack.com/p/10-things-dems-could-do-right-now

* "For the love of God, stop trying to give Trump more police power."

Congressional Dems are working hard to renew the Patriot Act, giving
Trump MORE surveillance power and *less* oversight.

The knock at the door in the night after you attend the protest? It's
their fault.

* "Do not pass a Pentagon spending bill that would fund Trump’s military
invasion of American cities."

House Dems have the power of the purse. *Right now*, they could amend
the Pentagon's budget to ban the agency from using *one cent* turning
America's military against its people.

* "Call Trump’s bluff, use his own plan to defund the police -- and
launch investigations"

Trump threatened a budget that slashed spending to local cops. Call his
bluff. Pass the budget. Then start a round of Congressional hearings
into police misconduct.

* "Stop giving military-grade weapons to local police departments."

Congress can amend the NDAA or attach a rider to the Pentagon's budget
that bans this grotesque practice, conceived of to enrich arms merchants
while turning US cities into literal warzones.

* "Fire the bad police chiefs and deescalate."

Democrats hold the mayor's office in America's largest cities. America's
police chiefs serve at their pleasure. Fire any chief who can't control
their force, just as Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer.

* "Prosecute the bad cops."

Every Democratic DA and state attorney should vigorously prosecute every
cop who abuses their authority to commit crimes under color of law.

* "Restrict the National Guard."

Democratic governors can demobilize their National Guard units and dare
Trump to federalize them.

* "Pass legislation restricting the police and ending immunity."

Qualified immunity is a judge-made doctrine that effectively shields
cops from civil consequences for any crime.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#qualified-immunity

* "Repeal and block anti-protester laws, and pass state protections."

Anti-protester laws are unconstitutional on their face. Any Democratic
state house with the power to repeal them should do so immediately.

* "Stop taking money from police associations."

These are organizations whose leaders walk around with *White Power*
badges on their uniforms.

Literally.

I know corporate Dems never met a buck they wouldn't take, but can the
buck, finally, stop here?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/31/parts-found-in-sea/#acab-spring

Trump is a fascist. He is the problem. But for several days now, due to
a Twitter glitch, I've been the third result for searches for
"#BlackLivesMatter," and I've been targeted by every mouth-breathing
pencil-necked Hitler wannabe with a face from Walmart.

A number of these howling monstrosities' bios included this quote:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing."*

Proving a stopped clock is right every now and again.

(*Hilariously, they inevitably misattributed it to Patrick Henry)

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🙅🏿‍♂️ Save Uncle Hugo's

Uncle Hugo's is a beloved science fiction bookselling institution, a
Minneapolis bookstore of the sort you hardly see any longer, crammed
with new and used books and magazines, a palace of endless browsing
pleasure.

http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/index.shtml

It burned down in this week's uprising, along with its adjacent
sister-store, Uncle Edgar's (a mystery bookstore) and while it sounds
like the owners will get something from their insurers, independent
bookselling has been on the ropes for years.

It's unlikely that insurance alone will suffice to save the store,
especially when you consider how the pandemic lockdown has emptied the
reserves and piled up the debt of every business.

That's why Uncle Hugos' fans have raised more than $41,000 for the
stores on a Gofundme. But there's a lot more needed - they're less than
10% of the way to their goal.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/let-us-help-save-uncle-hugo039s

I donated.

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🙅🏿‍♂️ Ella Jones is Ferguson's new mayor

The Black Lives Matter movement began in the Ferguson uprising, whose
proximate cause was the police murder of Michael Brown, but whose
context was a city that survived by immiserating and incarcerating Black
people.

Ferguson is one of those Red State low-tax zones, having capitulated to
the tax extremism of right-wing, white, wealthy people, and yet, it was
also a city that needed to keep the lights on, pave the roads, and run
its schools.

So to find revenue, Ferguson turned to its poorest residents - its Black
people - inventing a modern form of debt bondage, wherein Black people
were stopped for petty infractions and then subjected to massive fines.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/ferguson-cops-routinely-block-public-from-filming-them-doj-says

Failure to pay those fines created more fines, and so on. And since
debts that can't be paid won't be paid, the city needed a way to
convince Black people to go into punitive debt to pay their fines and
penalties.

So they created debtors' prisons.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/06/ferguson-judge-owes-unpaid-taxes-ronald-brockmeyer

The point being: the racist cops who harassed, beat and even murdered
the people of Ferguson may have been motivated by sadism and a disregard
for human life, but the system itself? It had a business-model. It was
about dehumanizing and abusing people for financial gain.

Flash forward to today, and there is genuine, long-overdue change in the
wind.

Ferguson just elected its first Black mayor, Ella Jones.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/500852-ella-jones-elected-as-first-black-mayor-of-ferguson-missouri

Asked to sum up the significance of her win, Jones said, "One word:
inclusion."

Ferguson's police force now answers to Jones. She has the ability to set
the city's agenda, up to a less barbaric way of funding its operation
than debtors' prisons.

Ferguson is not alone in funding itself through legal harassment. In
America, the Blacker a city is, the more it fines its residents.

https://priceonomics.com/the-fining-of-black-america/

Jones's win a small step, and long overdue, but it's also a small sliver
of goodness in a time of rage and sorrow.

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🙅🏿‍♂️ Why protests become violent

Amid all the bad-faith cherry-picking of MLK's speeches on nonviolent
resistance as a means of dismissing the valid and necessary anger in
America's streets, there's a real question: why do some protests include
property damage and violence, and what can be done about it?

Let's start with when and whether "violent" protests work. Many people
have cited the massive, nonviolent South Korean protests of 2016 as
evidence that peaceful protest is, in and of itself, sufficient to
create political change.

But as Ask A Korean points out, these protests were the culmination of
years of violent clashes between protesters and police. The "peaceful"
protests of 2016 were triggered by the increasing police violence in
suppressing the more muscular protests that preceded them.

https://twitter.com/AskAKorean/status/1267817416836263946

The South Korean police had declared open season on Jeolla-do people,
killing them with impunity. But student protesters weren't killed - they
were arrested, beaten and maimed, but murder was out.

In 1987, though, the police murdered two students, Park Jong-cheo
(waterboarded to death) and Yi Han-yeol (gas cannister to his head);
this precipitated the "June Struggle," in which the protest's vanguard
was joined by a mass movement of white-collar professionals.

The June Struggle was the death-knell for the authoritarian regime of
Chun Doo-hwan.

The same thing happened in 2016/7: labor unions, farmers, and other
disfavored people protested in the face of overwhelming police violence,
staying on the lines.

The injuries and deaths mobilized white collar professionals and their
families, people whom the police could not beat or murder with impunity.
Those were the "peaceful" protests - peaceful because the police did not
dare raise their clubs to the "protected" class.

This isn't just a lesson about tactics; it's also a lesson about the
origin of violence in policing. Indeed, as Maggie Koerth writes in Five
Thirty Eight, there is decades' worth of research on the subject.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-protesters-and-police-safer-heres-why-departments-respond-with-force-anyway/

The unequivocal finding of this peer-reviewed research: police
escalation leads to violence. Sending police to protests in riot gear
begets riots. Tear-gas begets violence. These are the findings of
scholars and blue-ribbon panels alike.

They are roundly ignored by police.

There's a feedback loop: violent suppression of protest leads to
militancy among protesters; this is the pretence for more violent
suppression. We know this, we just don't act on it.

Instead, "We live in a world where trained cops can panic and act on
impulse, but untrained civilians must remain calm with a gun in their face."

http://www.blackvibes.com/features/blogs/djdetroit-blacklivesmatter-black-lives-570127

Some police officials argue that de-escalation puts cops at risk - that
turning the other cheek when your adversary is in a hitting mood is
suicidal tactics. That may sound reasonable, but only if you fail to ask
why your adversary is in that mood.

Maybe it's because the police union has campaigned to continue violent,
sadistic "Warrior training" for its officers, teaching them to treat the
people they police as their enemies.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/police-unions-history-minneapolis-reform-george-floyd

Credibility and consent of the governed is an asset that is easy to
squander and hard to accumulate. But the only way out of the trap of
mistrust and trauma is to demonstrate goodwill.

Image:
샛길
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:080503_ROK_Protest_Against_US_Beef_Agreement_05.jpg

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


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🙅🏿‍♂️ PPE vs riot gear

Dressing up cops like they're on patrol in Mosul isn't just a bad
policing, it's also incredibly expensive.

Michael Jude Deleon Plondaya did some rough calculations, using the gear
visible on US cops and checking prices with Security Pro USA's
bargain/sale page.

https://twitter.com/markerslinger/status/1267624624235270145

The total he came to, $854, is a lowball estimate, but even so, it's
more than enough to outfit 55 front-line health-care workers in
top-of-the-range PPE.

Neoclassical economists bang on about "revealed preferences" - say that
you shouldn't listen to what people say about their economic choices,
but rather what they do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

Disregard the words of lifelong smokers who say they're bitter about
their lung cancer and attend instead to all the cigarettes they smoked.

Ignore peoples' stated concerns about Facebook's privacy invasions and
pay attention, instead, to the amount of time they spend there.

As critics of this theory have pointed out, people may do things because
they are addicted, or coralled, or coerced.

But I think there's value in applying revealed preferences to a society.

When officials decide to spend 5,500% of the cost of outfitting pandemic
workers on outfitting militarized police, they are telling you who they
think you are, and what you value.

More importantly, they're telling you who *they* are, and what *they* value.

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🙅🏿‍♂️ Zoom wants to help the FBI spy on you

Zoom has caught a lot of (deserving) flack for its insecurity, which
inaugurated the pandemic with an epidemic of "zoombombing" by trolls.
Things got worse when we learned that the company had lied about its
encryption.

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/

But since then, the company has made great strides in improving its
security, including adding real, end-to-end encryption to its meetings
(for paid customers). This means that no one, not even Zoom itself, can
spy on those meetings without an invitation.

But when it comes to UNPAID meetings, there is no such privacy. The
company can spy on everything you do in those meetings. When asked to
explain this discrepancy, Zoom CEO (and newly minted billionaire) Eric
Yuan was refreshingly frank.

"Free users for sure we don’t want to give that because we also want to
work together with FBI, with local law enforcement in case some people
use Zoom for a bad purpose."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-02/zoom-transforms-hype-into-huge-jump-in-sales-customers

That is, Zoom wants to ensure that the same law enforcement agencies
that are brutalizing American protesters can spy on them while they plan
their protests. There's no legal requirement for this.

It's just Zoom, taking a side.

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🙅🏿‍♂️ Trivial-to-spoof UK contact tracing

The UK's contact-tracing system has spared little thought for security;
if you may have been exposed, you'll get a phone call from a stranger,
warning you to get tested. The only way to verify these calls is to
check the (easy to spoof) caller ID.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/02/contact_tracing_spoofable/

The risk is far from hypothetical. Britons have been plagued by scammers
who used fake texts and phone calls to trick people into dialing
high-cost toll numbers or hand over personal information.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/features-and-news/coronavirus-scam-calls-and-texts

Alas, the UK did not follow through on an earlier project to create a
separate emergency alert infrastructure.

https://www.jake-davis.com/post/uk-government-covid19-text-alert

There's still the possibility of creating such a system with the UK's
(still not ready for primetime) app, but whether or not that happens,
the UK should take this opportunity to create that infrastructure before
the *next* crisis.

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🙅🏿‍♂️ AT&T; will punish Disney+ viewers

AT&T; epitomizes the failure of America's corporate regulation. After
the company spent millions on dirty tricks to help Trump's FCC Chairman
Ajit Pai kill Net Neutrality, it went on a stock-buyback spree while
reducing its network improvement budget.

Capex continued to suffer, even after the company got a $20B tax cut
from the Trump tax deal.

One thing the company DID spend on was acquisitions, going on a buying
spree that included acquiring Time-Warner and Directv.

Randall Stephenson, the CEO who oversaw this plan, got paid $32m for his
trouble, even as the company haemorrhaged money and subscribers, as his
plan to "synergize" telcoms and entertainment failed spectacularly.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/13/go-katie-go/#failingup

Stephenson collected a golden parachute and bailed on AT&T;, but the
synergy plan lives on, merging every strand of AT&T;'s monopolistic
behavior.

They're going to exempt HBO Max from broadband bills, while charging for
rivals like Disney+ and Netflix.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/2/21277402/hbo-max-att-data-caps-netflix-disney-plus-streaming-services-net-neutrality

Disney has bet the farm on Disney+: without theme parks, movie theaters,
hotels or cruise ships, the company is hoping to leverage a $6/month
teaser rate for subscriptions into a position so dominant that cable
operators won't dare mess with them.

This is Netflix's plan as well: to be so well-loved by cable subscribers
that cable operators won't dare to mess with them.

https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/netflix-ceo-says-u-s-rollback-of-net-neutrality-rules-is-no-big-deal-1202874570/

This is not a good plan.

AT&T; is desperate, cord-cutting is epidemic, the company has a massive
overhang from its attempt to create a vertical monopoly, and it has
never, ever been shy about making its customers angry at it.

As HBO Max boss Tony Concalves told The Verge: "The network is the
plumbing, and the content is the water. And you’re seeing water and the
plumbing kind of coming together."

This is going to get ugly.

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🙅🏿‍♂️ K-pop fandom pivots to human rights hacktivism

K-pop fandom is feared all over the net for its power to mobilize
bazillions of stans to flood servers with fancams - short videos of
K-pop stars performing.

Now, they're disrupting authoritarians.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/3/21278950/k-pop-stans-social-media-flooding-hashtags-bluelivesmatter-maga

It started on Sunday, when K-pop fancams overwhelmed the Dallas Police
Department's snitchline, where people had been asked to submit videos of
protesters breaking the law. DPD surrendered and shut it down.

Now they're flooding the hashtags for #MAGA and #BlueLivesMatter,
answering @stayy_zz's call to action; they've also overwhelmed Kirland,
WA's snitch hashtag, #calminkirkland.

https://twitter.com/stayy_zz/status/1267748800925319170

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🙅🏿‍♂️ This day in history

#15yrsago KGB successor wants Great Firewall of Russia
https://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1384269.htm

#5yrsago Neal Stephenson's Seveneves: five thousand years of apocalypse
and rebirth
https://boingboing.net/2015/06/03/neal-stephensons-seveneves.html

#5yrsago Abortion workers: the terrorist victims America won't protect
https://newrepublic.com/article/121941/subculture-embattled-abortion-workers

#5yrsago Letter from the post-work dystopian future
https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/hello-and-goodbye-in-portuguese/

#5yrsago On Allen Ginsberg's 89th birthday, read his FBI file
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/apr/30/fbi-agents-instructed-not-interview-allen-ginsberg/

#5yrsago USA Freedom Act: the good, the bad, and what's next USA Freedom
Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go From Here
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/usa-freedom-act-passes-what-we-celebrate-what-we-mourn-and-where-we-go-here

Speech Police: vital, critical look at the drive to force Big Tech to
control who may speak and what they may say
https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/briar-patches-r-us-2.html

#1yrago Ted Chiang's "Op Ed From the Future": socialized transhumanism
vs American oligarchy
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/opinion/ted-chiang-future-genetic-engineering.html

#1yrago Report from the Fed reveals that "economic growth" is a highly
localized phenomena, masking widespread financial desperation
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/06/st-louis-fed-study-shows-rising-level-of-financial-desperation-among-the-poor-hidden-by-aggregates.html

#1yrago All weekend, California Democrats booed neoliberal would-be
presidents who talked down the Green New Deal and Medicare for All
https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/awwwww-kward.html

#1yrago That woman who got fired for comparing Michelle Obama to an ape
is now going to jail for defrauding FEMA
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-who-called-michelle-obama-ape-sentenced-jail-defrauding-fema-n1012936

#1yrago The army of contractor-linguists who power Google Assistant say
they had their wages stolen
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/a-white-collar-sweatshop-google-assistant-contractors-allege-wage-theft

#1yrago Rumor: DoJ is going to investigate Google for antitrust
violations
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/31/doj-preparing-antitrust-probe-of-google---dow-jones.html

#1yrago Stop saying "robots are coming for your job"; start saying "Your
boss wants to replace you with a robot"
https://gizmodo.com/robots-are-not-coming-for-your-job-management-is-1835127820

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🙅🏿‍♂️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Whatever (whatever.scalzi.com/), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Kottke (https://kottke.org/), JWZ
(http://www.jwz.org/blog/), David Sirota (https://twitter.com/davidsirota).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 504 words (22583
total).

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/01/how-big-tech-monopolies-distort-our-public-discourse/

Upcoming appearances: Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
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