[Plura-list] Everybody Knows; "Longshot" NYPD surveillance transparency law passes; Juneteenth in the Internet Archive
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Sat Jun 20 11:48:37 EDT 2020
Today's links
* Everybody Knows: Charles Hugh Smith has prepared the rap sheet.
* "Longshot" NYPD surveillance transparency law passes: NYC has finally
passed the POST Act.
* Juneteenth in the Internet Archive: Living history, in your browser.
* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading
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👩🏾🎨 Everybody Knows
Between the pandemic, the uprisings, and the gloves-off/mask-off
rhetoric of the GOP's white supremacist leaders (and the dog-whistles of
the reactionary elements of the Democrats), it's clear that the system
is very, very broken, and can't/won't survive in its current form.
I often return to Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," an anthem for
looming rupture:
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg
A more specific, incandescent, and contemporary version is Charles Hugh
Smith's recent essay, "For the Rich to Keep Getting Richer, We Have to
Sacrifice Everything Else."
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/06/for-rich-to-keep-getting-richer-we-have.html
Smith opens with the apologists' chorus: "inequality isn't quite as bad
as everyone claims"; "inequality is bad, but it's notpolicymakers'
fault; the causes are all beyond our control"; "we're mystified how
giving trillions to the super-wealthy somehow made them richer."
And "We're perplexed why so little of the trillions we've handed the
already-super-rich has trickled down to the little gals and guys
struggling to keep their heads above water."
This isn't a new phenomenon: it's part of a 40-year program that's left
us with "no cultural memory of a time when "democracy" wasn't a
pay-to-play bidding war between vested interests, insiders,
billionaires, global corporations and PACs pushing self-serving agendas."
This hasn't merely stripped most of us of our material wealth, it's also
left us with "nothing binding the nation together except I got mine
greed, narcissism and anger, all of which fuel a blood-soaked circus of
fragmentation and disorder."
The beneficiaries of this system have no idea how awful they sound when
they explain why it's all fine: "Academics who've gorged on the $2
trillion in student loan debt have no idea how they sound when they
insist that their class is so valuable that it's worth any price."
"Healthcare and Big Pharma CEOs must not realize how offensively
clownish their defense of $1 million medical bills sound to people who
are being forced into bankruptcy so the CEOs can collect an extra $20
million in stock options this quarter."
And while small business owners have to personally guarantee the loans
they need to survive the crisis, big business has access to unlimited
government capital and face no consequences when they squander it.
"If you're the CEO of an airline who borrowed $46 billion and blew it
buying your own stocks so you could cash in millions of dollars in stock
options--never mind that, here's $50 billion in bailout money that won't
require you to make any personal sacrifice whatsoever."
"Consider this database of 6,300 major corporate fines and settlements
from the early 1990s to 2015 compiled by Jon Morse. Nobody made any
personal sacrifices or paid any personal fines or served any prison time
for any of these thousands of violations."
("A fine is a price")
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/468061
"Generating goods, services and jobs is for chumps. Get over it. The
real money is made bellying up to the Fed's free money for financiers
spigot."
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👩🏾🎨 "Longshot" NYPD surveillance transparency law passes
The uprisings over racist police violence are not the endpoint - they're
part of a pattern of waves of discontent that build and build in
frequency and intensity, as more people come to the cause. On the way,
the protests lead to structural changes that help with that growth.
Case in point: NYC Council has passed the longshot "Public Oversight of
Surveillance Technology Act" with a veto-proof majority of 44-6, (that
veto-proofness isn't as important as it was a couple weeks ago, before
Mayor de Blasio switched from opposing to supporting POST).
POST is a modest but crucial step to ending the impunity of cops. It
"requires NYPD to publish a use policy for each surveillance tech it
intends to use."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/victory-new-yorks-city-council-passes-post-act
Then there's public comment, and then "the NYPD Commissioner will be
required to provide a final version of the surveillance impact and use
policy to the City Council, the mayor, and the public."
This is so modest that the cops' vehement opposition to it demonstrates
their understanding of how overreaching and unpopular the currently
secret use of surveillance tech would be if it was known.
But it's also so foundational: how can you ask for changes in police
surveillance tech if the tech itself is a secret?
Bravo to STOP for their tireless activism on this law, and
congratulations on a stunning victory!
STOP is part of EFF's Electronic Frontier Alliance, a network of dozens
of grassroots organizations across America who coordinate for causes of
technological liberation. Here's where you can find an EFA chapter near you.
https://www.eff.org/fight
POST follows on from other, similar struggles that brought notorious,
surveillant police forces to heel: in Oakland, activists from Oakland
Privacy - another EFA member - got comprehensive police surveillance
accountability legislation passed in 2018.
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👩🏾🎨 Juneteenth in the Internet Archive
Many of us know the Internet Archive through the Wayback Machine, an
incredible archive of virtually every web-page ever created, stretching
back decades.
But the Archive has so much more than that: among its wealth of open
access holdings is an archive of material relevant to anyone trying to
understand the historical context of Juneteenth.
https://blog.archive.org/2020/06/19/juneteenth-resources/
Their Community Media Archive has 193 local news reports on celebrations
of Juneteenth from 2016-2019.
https://archive.org/details/community_media?and%5B%5D=juneteenth
Then there are the anti-slavery collections from Oberlin and the Boston
Public Library:
https://archive.org/details/antislavery
https://archive.org/details/bplscas
I got lost for hours in the 1700+ documents in the James Birney
Collection of Anti-Slavery Pamphlets, scanned from the archives of Johns
Hopkins.
https://archive.org/details/birney
There's loads more, but I especially want to call your attention to the
Historical Slavery Collection, which features oral histories from, and
photos of, formerly enslaved people, courtesy of the New Deal's Federal
Writers Project.
https://archive.org/details/historical-slaver
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👩🏾🎨 This day in history
#15yrsago Ringtone of Philippine prez fixing election wildly popular
https://web.archive.org/web/20051107114830/http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2005/June/theworld_June523.xml§ion;=theworld&col;=
#15yrsago Starbucks mermaid: from dirty 15th C engraving to sanitized
logo https://www.deadprogrammer.com/starbucks-logo-mermaid
#10yrsago Mickey Mouse, amphetamine shill
https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/mickey_mouse_medicine_man/mickey_mouse_medicine_man.shtml
#5yrsago The snitch in your pocket: making sense of Stingrays
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/notetoself/episodes/stingray-conspiracy-theory-daniel-rigmaiden-radiolab
#5yrsago Schneier: China and Russia probably did get the Snowden leaks
-- by hacking the NSA
https://www.wired.com/2015/06/course-china-russia-snowden-documents/
#5yrsago UK High Court's insane ruling: ripping CDs is illegal again
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/european-copyright-madness-court-strikes-down-law-allowing-users-rip-their-own-cds
#5yrsago Teaching image-recognition algorithms to produce nightmarish
hellscapes
https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html
#1yrago Tennessee lawmaker defends operating an unregistered "Christian
magic supply" business
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/20/matthew-hill-tennessee-house-speaker-christian-magic-supply-business-dock-haley-gospel-magic/1481310001/
#1yrago Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the case for reparations to Congress
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/ta-nehisi-coates-testimony-house-reparations-hr-40/592042/
#1yrago Wonderful profile of Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist games critic
who made an army of shitty manbabies very, very upset
https://www.polygon.com/features/2019/6/19/18679678/anita-sarkeesian-feminist-frequency-interview-history-story
#1yrago The "ghost networks" of mental health professionals that US
health insurers rely on to deny care to their patients
https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/17/ghost-networks-psychiatrists-hinder-patient-care/
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👩🏾🎨 Colophon
Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/), Waxy
(https://waxy.org/), Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).
Currently writing:
* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Friday's progress: 503 words (29686 total).
* A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Yesterday's
progress: 317 words (2251 total)
Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater
Latest podcast: Part 6 of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town"
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/14/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-06/
Upcoming appearances:
* In Conversation with Hank Green, Jul 10,
https://www.magersandquinn.com/product_info?isbn_id=26578312&products;_id=163359157
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; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla
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