Some leftists are echoing right-wing talking points about the South being abandoned by the .gov in the wake of Helene. It's just not true y'all. We can talk about how services could be better or about how mutual aid does things the .gov can't/won't, but let's be honest/cautious. The people I've talked to on the ground have consistently referred to ongoing federal efforts as crucial while also emphasizing that those efforts are not reaching everyone. The scale of the disaster and the nature of the terrain are major factors. It's not abandonment.

Folks who are traveling to Chicago for the DNC, please be careful about who you connect with. If you meet strangers who are talking big game about doing "epic" shit, ask yourselves why they're saying these things to someone they don't even know. They might be cops who want you to get hyped and drunk and run your mouth. We have seen this before. In 2012, a couple of undercovers latched onto three out-of-towners who showed up to protest the NATO summit. They hung out with those guys, got high with them, and talked big.

When he was still doing climate journalism before retiring young (and not bc that work pays big), Dahr Jamail wrote: "I am learning how to bridge gaps between myself and the people I love who are navigating in a different reality." And fuck if that doesn't resonate. This is all my therapist heard about recently: what it is to hold so much painful knowledge that you can't just casually dump on other people bc that info has to be parceled carefully alongside ideas about what the fuck to do, or it just demobilizes people or shuts them down.

Some thoughts on "political violence." organizingmythoughts.org/what-does-peac… "What does peace mean in the heart of empire amid the realities of racial capitalism? What does it mean to politicians whose primary concern is the maintenance of an economic system that is driving most life on earth toward extinction? It means order." organizingmythoughts.org/what-does-peac…

Noticing some folks reasoning that particular students don't deserve a militant police response bc they are "peaceful." I don't care if students break windows, shove back, or throw things; none of them deserve a militarized police response. They're protesting a genocide. Folks should be careful about conjuring standards that determine whether someone is deserving of police violence. It's enough to say that the people protesting a genocide should not be harmed.

Many people in colonial societies believe (or simply accept as a norm, without argument) that any amount of suffering and death is acceptable within out-groups to sustain their in-group's way of life. This is especially true in the imperial core, where I live. The idea of a "whatever it takes" stance being adopted by those out-groups, as they pursue a freer existence, or simply demand to survive, inspires genocidal zeal among many people in colonial societies. Standards of decency are about how their in-groups are treated, not others.

.@BostonReview published an excerpt from Let This Radicalize You. It's from a chapter called Organizing Isn't Matchmaking. "It is no exaggeration to say that the whole world is at stake, and we cannot afford to minimize what that demands of us." bostonreview.net/articles/how-m… "Put simply, we need more people. What do we mean by this? We are not talking about launching search parties to find an undiscovered army of people with already-perfected politics with whom we will easily and naturally align." bostonreview.net/articles/how-m…

Once, on the bus, a white guy got mad that I moved his umbrella off the seat next to him and sat down. He was so furious that he slapped a frappuccino out of my hand. It went flying and splashed some lady’s clothes. That’s more harm than Jordan Neely caused anyone. There were no other seats and I was exhausted, and needed to sit down, but this guy just couldn’t fathom that I had touched his property. He was yelling loudly that I was a bitch, that the woman on other side of him was fat, and he hit my hand and ruined some stranger’s clothing.

In our 100th episode of @MovementMemos, @prisonculture and I discuss our upcoming book Let This Radicalize You, the perils of visibility, and how we cultivate hope in our lives and work. I really love this episode and I hope you will too. truthout.org/audio/let-this… The last four episodes of this season of @MovementMemos will mark the release of Let This Radicalize You by delving into some of the topics we discuss in the book. I wanted to begin with a convo between me & Mariame, and we had such a great time making it. truthout.org/audio/let-this…

The only thing that's unique or shocking about the cops doing nothing while people were being harmed downtown is that it happened downtown. cops intervene and commit violence when they want to. It almost never happens in the name of halting other violence. The story of someone stepping in front of a squad car and pointing to an assault in progress, only to have the cops drive around them and ignore the violence literally only jumps out at me because it happened downtown, in the heart of the city's wealth. Otherwise, it's normal.

At the end of 2022, I sat w a young person in the ER for about 12 hrs. For various reasons, it was important they not be alone. I saw so many patients being treated so horribly from the moment they arrived. The system is fraying apart. A lot of healthcare providers seem broken.

https://twitter.com/DisabledDem/status/1648427870962999302

I understand why. A lot of health care workers in the US have been ground under in ways that are unforgivable. I'm sure I wouldn't be the same either. I probably wouldn't have as much to offer. I might not give as many fucks. I understand, and also, it's truly awful for everyone.

People on here are often determined to interpret your words in the least generous way possible, because they just want to fight. It's recreational anger. It's not always easy to recognize and sometimes we swing back when we shouldn't, but it's worth trying to discern. No one's picking a fight with me today btw. Today, I'm just concerned for others who I see folks picking at. Some people need hobbies. It's not easy being hypervisible and having your every thought picked over for ungenerous interpretation. You don't have to answer to everyone.

The reason he will get away w this obvious lie is that so many people have played into fantasies that spicy autocomplete is nearing the realm of artificial general intelligence, which it most definitely is not. It’s an idea that’s used to keep us mesmerized while we’re oppressed.

https://twitter.com/sawyermerritt/status/1648081976400703488

AI is already used to harm, coerce and destroy people on a daily basis. It does not have to reach some hyper intelligent supervillain status to do so (and is nowhere near that, at all). That specter is misdirection to keep us fearing sci-fi instead of rich people and bureaucracy.

More books? No. These are cookies that @prisonculture had made for me that look like our book! 😂❤️

I have the goofiest and most wonderful friends in the world. To preorder a copy of the actual book: bit.ly/LetThisRadical…

To order cookies that look like the book, you should apparently talk to Brookie’s Cookies in NYC. They do excellent work.

They want to end public education. Some people can’t get their heads around that bc it seems too big (the way the fall of Roe seemed impossible to some), but they plan to destroy public ed entirely. Public education was the result of struggle. It has remained a site of struggle. And when I say “they,” I don’t just mean Republicans, even tho they are big perpetrators here (and have chipped away at public ed ferociously since the end of legal segregation). Neoliberal privatizers like Vallas want to destroy public ed — and have already done a lot of damage.

.@TerriFriedline: "Private finance, like settler-colonialism, is not inevitable. The aftermath of SVB’s failure is a time to raise awareness of the contradictions and learn how elite power preserves wealth." truthout.org/articles/silic… "It is a time to question why tech companies and venture capitalists receive bailouts while elders have their Social Security checks garnished to repay loans for educational degrees they might never have received." truthout.org/articles/silic…

More than 300 people per day are still dying of COVID in the US. That’s over 2,000 per week. Over 100,000 people per year — a loss once deemed “incalculable” has now been calculated, and deemed acceptable, because masking in public spaces is not conducive to capitalism. We should be masking on planes, trains, in grocery stores and in medical settings. Bc those 100,000 lives are worth it. But they have been devalued in most people’s minds and deemed expendable for the sake of recreating some sickly version of the social relations we once knew.

This is a TERRIBLE article. Stop trying to rehabilitate Lightfoot. She was always awful and Chicago’s grassroots community, including queer people, tried to warn you. She is a god awful mayor who oversaw the most extreme police violence against protesters here in my lifetime.

https://twitter.com/pinknews/status/1631609109630836736

She raised the bridges downtown to trap and gas people. The Chicago Freedom School had cops trying to force their way in to arrest wounded teenagers and the city threatened to shut them down for offering shelter to battered protesters. Teenagers. Who were gassed and bleeding.

"At other times, he has broached the topic of euthanasia. 'The possibility of making it mandatory in the future,' he said in one interview, will 'come up in discussion.'" Dude also says "'euthanasia (either voluntary or involuntary) is a complex, nuanced issue.'”

HORRIFYING.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1624795488057786373

There is nothing complex or nuanced about "involuntary euthanasia." That's just murder. This kind of talk aims to normalize the murder of disabled and elderly people, and to be real, society is primed to accept this kind of shit as mainstream. It must be fiercely rejected.

This piece uses the “White Noise” connection as a hook but contains some decent info on the crisis in East Palestine, Ohio. Those story is largely being suppressed bc it makes a lot of powerful people look bad and they’re trying to cover up the damage done
cnn.com/2023/02/11/hea… The government is acting like the crisis is over, but animals are still getting sick and dropping dead. wkbn.com/news/local-new…

“I see the life and death of Tortuguita through the lens of nearly four decades spent in the struggle to free veteran Black Panther and MOVE sympathizer Mumia Abu-Jamal.” Alana Yu-lan Price and I interview veteran Black Panther Julia Wright in @truthout. truthout.org/articles/fred-… I was honored to work on this and hope folks will check it out. As I say in the piece, “We must not sever this shooting from the legacies of violence that clarify the character of the system and purpose of law enforcement.” truthout.org/articles/fred-…